Integrating direct quotations and paraphrases
The facing paragraphs are from the article,
"To Boldly Go," by McKinley and Marceau, in the January 2000 AJPH. In a
two-page section entitled "some limitations of conventional public health,"
they weave into their discussion more than two dozen references, bringing in
the "voices" and opinions of many writers to build their argument. They do
this by summarizing and paraphrasing their sources (paragraph 1, citation #9,
10) as well as with direct quotations. The direct quotations are sometimes
partial sentences (paragraph 1, citation #8) which fit grammatically into the
structure of the authors' complete sentence. Occasionally they use full
sentence quotations, as in citation #13 in paragraph 2. Notice that this
direct quotation is carefully attributed to Rose with the introductory phrase,
"He observed". In fact, all of the direct quotations and paraphrases are
attributed to their originators: they are not merely "dropped" into the text
to substitute for the authors' own wording. Instead, the authors tell a story
about what others have said, reporting on other people's research and thought,
and using this "report" to come to their own conclusion.
This use of source material is similar to what SPH students must do in their research papers. By carefully summarizing, paraphrasing, and using a limited number of especially salient direct quotations, they give an account of the "conversation" on their topic as they review the literature or build a step-by-step argument. Imagine your sources as stepping stones, and your own narrative thread as the leaps you take from one to the next that keep you getting down the stream of your thinking.
Note: The paragraphs to the right are cut and pasted from a full-text Medline article, and the citations are underlined because they are hyperlinked in Medline format. In a word-processed academic paper, your numbered citations should be in super-script or in brackets.
Note also that in the case of direct quotations, the page number is indicated with the citation number, a style you should also use in papers.
Some Limitations of Conventional Public Health….
As an illustration, consider one discipline within public health, epidemiology, which has much to offer health policy (other equally good illustrations might be economics, biostatistics, sociology, or toxicology). In marked contrast to its origins, the established epidemiology that is shaping public health today appears hamstrung by its adherence to an individualist/medical natural science paradigm.1,2 Conventional epidemiology is limited by the following:….
1. Lack of theory development. Established epidemiology can actually explain very little, because in epidemiology, unlike most disciplines, there is little interest in developing theories that can be tested.6,7 Lamenting the absence of theory development, Smith likened the product of today's epidemiology to "a vast stock-pile of almost surgically clean data untouched by human thought."8 Krieger, among others, has called for theory development in public health so as to understand and improve by planned actions the health of the public.9,1
2. Limitations of dichotomous thinking. Even though it is now widely accepted that the response curve is continuous and smooth for most risk factors and conditions, dichotomous thinking nonetheless prevails and still determines our actions.11 Using hypertension as one example, Rose 12,13 described the different activities that logically follow from dichotomous thinking and from continuous thinking. He observed, "Paradoxically, it is epidemiologic research which has now repeatedly demonstrated that in fact disease is nearly always a quantitative rather than a categorical or qualitative phenomenon, and hence it has no natural definitions."13(pxx) Whole-population approaches to public health that follow from acceptance of the continuous nature of risk are precluded "because it is a departure from the ordinary process of binary thought to which they are brought up."13 (p8)