ThisIsCool

By "How?" I'm not talking about formatting. That's covered in "How JOE and Other Internet Sources Should Be Cited in JOE," another link on Help for JOE Authors. I'm talking about how you can use JOE citations to strengthen your own article. Too many authors feel that the only relevant JOE articles are those on the exact same subjects of their own articles, but that's not necessarily the case. Perhaps there are, for example, a number of articles on 4-H recruitment, but none on the importance of parents in the process. You could cite a few of those recruitment articles and make the point that your article fills a gap in the scholarship. Maybe there are a number of articles on your subject—even your exact same subject—but your research contradicts or amends the findings reported in those articles or takes a different tack. What better way to establish your point and underscore the originality and importance of your article than by citing a few of them? Or perhaps your article validates work that has been done by others or adds to it. Citing those works is a way of adding credibility to your article. Citing JOE articles is also helpful because many JOE readers are much more familiar with JOE than they are with other scholarly journals and because JOE articles are easily retrievable. What I wrote in "What's Wrong Skimpy References Sections?" (yet another link on Help for JOE Authors) about contributing to the test word scholarly dialogue holds doubly true for JOE articles and the JOE scholarly dialogue.