So I'm making a creative graphic novel piece and I wanted to also include some statistics in the narration part. Problem is that these stats are from someone else's study. Can I use them if I cite, or are they unusable? Obviously, they connect to my story and I would be using them for this sense.
It depends on where you got the study and whether the information presented there is considered public knowledge or not. If it is published in a science magazine or website, you should be able to use it as long as you refer to it. And possibly even if you don't refer but then you risk credibility, but don't take my word on that. Legal issues may follow. If it's a study from a university's archives or similar, then you need the permission of the student/professor who created it in the first place. Or refer to the policy of the university. In other cases the study or source should say whether it is legal to publish the content or not. If you stole the study, then shame on you and you shouldn't use it. Having said that, I'd say to steer clear from using real world statistics in a work of fiction, but I really can't say yay or nay when I don't know what you are gunning for here.
You may not even need to cite. It should be pretty obvious that you're not reporting on your own research given that it's incorporated into a work of fiction. The other main reason to cite would be to prove that you actually have valid statistics instead of ones you made up, but for a work of fiction it really doesn't matter.
The statistics are real though, only the story is fiction, yet reflecting of the statistics. I think I'm writing a new genre, lol.
I think the point is that the two main reasons that you need to cite a source when you use a statistic is so A) people know where the statistic came from for credibility reasons B) people know that you aren't claiming that the statistic is yours. In a fictional story, those things aren't really important because the story is presumably made up anyway. I'm not too informed on legal issues like this, but common sense tells me you shouldn't even have to cite.
