Research writing: Quote or quotation?
Don’t quote me on this one…
Researchers commonly misuse the word ‘quote’ when they should use ‘quotation’. This mistake is so common that the two words are often considered to be synonymous.
Quote is a verb – a doing word. You quote someone when you take something they have said or written and reproduce that thing verbally or in writing.
The common mistake that research writers make is to reproduce the content sourced from someone else and refer to it as a quote. In a research report this might look something like “the following quote suggests…”.
The reproduced text is in fact a quotation. The word quotation is a noun – a thing.
For example of correct usage, in a recent article about Building resilience in children and young people, I quoted a study by Moss and colleagues. The quotation I used was:
Effective wellbeing interventions often included digital components, which promoted “anonymity, accessibility, prompt feedback, cost-effectiveness, high treatment fidelity, and applicability to real-life contexts” (Moss et al., 2023, p NA)
Another research example of similar words may further illustrate my point here.
When we create a written document that captures something someone has said verbatim, we have transcribed their words. The verb here is transcribe. The written version of the content is called the transcription. The equivalent mistake here would be emailing the transcription document to a collaborator and saying “attached is the transcribe of the interview”.