I interviewed over 60 thought leaders, each providing me a project case or detailed success story. Many of them gave me supplementary case documents which they have published in their blogs, some magazines, or other public domains. Thes documents either details the cases more or adds to the interviews I conducted. These documents were used in data analysis and are important pieces to my analysis.
Now while writing findings I need to use several of the quotes from these documents they provided me. My dilemma is how to do so? If I use the quotes with full references, then anonymity of the participant's I interviewed is compromised. If I use the quotes without proper references then these quotes will show up as plagiarism.
Has anyone encountered such problem and solved tactfully and ethically? I will appreciate your advice. What should I do? Any references supporting such approach in which public documents written by an individual participant are used in data analysis?
Dear Raman,
You need to cite the documents as anonymous quotes. The precise way you do this will depend upon the referencing system you are using. I recently helped to create a standard and this was one of the issues we needed to consider, e.g. in the medical context. Have a look at the book Cite them right: it may contain more information.
Thanks guys for the guidance. When I run the dissertation text in university's plagiarism software, it marks those quotes as 'copied' from other resources. This reduces my originality scores. How to address this issue? I have several quotes and very important ones coming from public published documents which are supporting document to the case being interviewed. Please guide.
Ignore so-called "originality scores".
But bear in mind that if the so-called plagiarism software can find your anonymous quotes, anybody interested could Google your "anonymous" quotes, and unmask the source!
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