What is the Most Important Thing?

Citations

Cite/document/explain. Often and thoroughly.

As you do your research, the most important thing is to document your source, your methodology and your analysis. Analysts at Utah Foundation will be referring to some of your work for the next few years, long after you have completed your internship, graduated, and no longer check the email we have on file. Please help us out by citing often in your memos. If you do any analysis on data, please thoroughly document the steps you went through. If it includes code, please annotate it well. If it includes the development of a methodology, please be clear and transparent about the value choices you made.

Many times these research projects get set aside while analysts are re-tasked to a project with a higher priority. In other cases, analysts will want to update past research, or apply past research to new geographies. In all of these cases, your careful citations and documentation is critical to helping us or future analysts understand the credibility and reliability of the data and how to adapt it to other projects.

How Often Should I Cite?

Often. Very often.

Often the memos and research you prepare gets either chopped up as it is put into a report or set aside for a year while other projects become more important. In either case it is important that we are able to track down all the information we are putting into our reports.

It would not necessarily be a bad move to cite every sentence. It is much easier to reduce during the review process than hunt down the source of a statement or fact. 

Citations as footnotes are preferred to in-text citations.

Do a full citation every time. We can always simplify to Ibid. later.