TRANSCRIPT: You are working on a research paper, the final assignment for one of your courses. It's due in a few hours, and you're making some final changes before the deadline. As you read through it, you realize that for some of the direct quotations and paraphrased materials that you included in your paper, the in-text citations are incomplete. You have included page numbers, but not the authors' names.
You have a reference list that appears on the last page of your paper, but unfortunately for each of the incomplete citations in the body of your paper, you can't remember which article you were referring to, or if the matching reference for that citation actually appears in your reference list.
You look back at your notes to try and figure it out, but you didn't know any of the reference information within your notes. Your notes just consist of copy and pasted material from several outside sources. Your professor had specifically asked for both in-text citations and a reference list.
You don't want to lose marks, so you read through your reference page and decide to choose from these sources to complete your in-text citations. You fill in each incomplete citation by choosing sources on your reference list at random. You believe that as long as you're giving credit to someone, it doesn't matter which source you include.