It's Citation Time!

No more wikipedia and google for the rest of my days, a big challenge is coming towards me, citation. Academic integrity is maybe one of the most necessary aspects on college education, because without it, people will easily still ideas from others in order to become recognized or just because they are too lazy to make their own work, but this system as any other, has limitations.

The main aspect of citation that I think should be improved is the lot of time, energy and paper that it requires. For every book where you find something interesting to put on your work, you have to write a bibliography at the end. This takes a lot of time, and there is like three different formats that people use for make these bibliographies. So you always need to be pendent about what is the citation style required. I am totally agreed that credit must be given to the authors of cited works. But I consider that the kind of bibliography writing style that we currently use, is not practical at all. 

I think that in the future there should be a system where every academic work has a code (like the ISBN). So when someone wants to cite someone else's work, they only need this code. Then using this code, people can access to a website where they automatically can find all the information about the cited work.   This will be more practical not only for students in academic institutions, but also for professors, because it will be easier to find works cited by their students. And also, is something positive for the environment, because sometimes these bibliographies take many pages which of course means a lot of paper and trees. With this idea, at the end of an academic work, the bibliography will look more a like a list of codes 

This is an example of how I think bibliographies should look:

DSFJ349FEKS9 PAG(36-42)

AST234REGO7  PAG(255,256)

I know that people love to see their names on other's work. But let’s get serious, someone’s last name is not enough information for people to know who you are. Instead of that, if people are interested on your work they can go to this web site, type the code, and more than just watching the complete bibliography of your work, they can access to the author's profile and learn about other published works. Isn't it a great idea?

Off course there should be someone interested on making the enormous work of giving to each published work for money. And if some works don't have a code, the old citation style can be used. 

Well, I don't know if this is going to happen someday, but meanwhile there is no more choice than the annoying long bibliographies.