Report writing – guidelines & suggestions
General Rules for Citations in Science Papers
Sources, References and Direct Quotations
IMPORTANT NOTE:
The following document gives you the basic guidelines and rules for citing in scientific papers, which must be adhered to in all written assignments and presentations. All information and images MUST be cited correctly.
Anything that is cited whether directly or indirectly must be identified as such 1) in the text AND 2) in a list of literature cited.
Photographs, graphs, diagrams etc, whether made by your friends, family, taken from a book or publication or downloaded from the internet need to be identified directly beside the image AND in the reference list.
The use of information or images without citing properly in text AND in the reference list is considered plagiarism and will be reported to the academic integrity committee. Please check your notes from your courses in the "ELI", the “Writing Program” as well as the Libraries course. In case of doubt you should look up information on Plagiarism on the AUC-website.
MLA citation format is NOT accepted in science papers.
Numbered Citations in the text are not accepted.
Table of Contents
IMPORTANT NOTE: 1
I. What is a Scholarly Source? 2
II. Citing written information 2
II.a. Citing information in the text (in-text citation) 2
Rules 2
Examples 3
II.b. “Literature Cited” section at the end of your report 3
All sources 3
Journal articles (printed or electronic journals) 3
Book chapters or conference proceedings (printed or electronic books) 3
Examples 3
III. Using images in your paper 4
III.a. Citing images in the text (in-text citation) 4
III.b. “Sources of images” section at the end of your report 5
Unpublished images 5
Published images, taken from scholarly sources 5
What is a Scholarly Source?
A lot is published about scientific topics. To write a scientific paper you verify the source of what you read to be able to trust its content.
For that reason only peer-reviewed, scholarly publications (journal articles, e-journals, books, e-books) are used in any scientific publication, or any written assignment at University.
Personal communications, lectures or presentations, and most lecture or lab- handouts do not undergo a rigorous peer-review and are thus not scholarly publications. They are, after all, not published. If you ever need to refer to such communications in a paper, you should refer them to in the text (Hassan 2008, pers. comm.), but not in the "literature cited", which is reserved for scholarly articles.
Websites are NOT scholarly peer reviewed sources and you MAY NOT quote directly from web sites.
You can of course find many scholarly sources on the Internet, and you may use the Internet to do a preliminary research and also to find primary scholarly sources.
To find scholarly source through the internet it is best to use scholarly search engines and to search databases that will lead you to scientific publications. Use the search engines and databases of AUC libraries!
Citing written information
1 Citing information in the text (in-text citation)
Rules
ALWAYS make clear whether you are quoting a fact or information (which you read or heard somewhere) or whether you are giving your opinion or interpretation. Keep in mind that most “general information” is in quotable information.
- When you quote in the text, you should add the author and year after the information you quoted.
1. If one author wrote the paper you quote in text:
Format: (Author-[last name only], XXXX[year])
Example: (Sheppard, 2003)
2. If two authors write a paper, write both authors in the order they are listed in the publication Format: (Author-[last name only] and Author-[last name only] , XXXX[year])
Example: (Starr and Taggart, 2001).
3. If there are more than 2 authors it is first author et al
Format: (First Author-[last name only] et al., XXXX[year])
Example: (Hassan et al., 2002)
- If you quote more than one or two sentences, the entire paragraph must be indented, and italicized to indicate that this passage is directly quoted. (see point 3. below)
- Citing from books
- Edited books will have one or more editors, which may be different from the authors of the individual chapters. Always refer to the author of the chapter or section, both in-text as well as in the literature cited as the author(s) (source), and refer to the editor(s) separately. (see point 4 below)
- Always include the Chapter or pages from which you are quoting. (The name of the Chapter should be listed. Only if it has no name, is the chapter number enough.)
- If you refer to more than one chapter, each chapter receives an independent entry, as a separate source in the list and in text.
Direct quotes
Direct quotes are unusual in scientific papers, and should only be used if absolutely necessary (i.e. almost never). However, if you do need to quote directly: Any long direct quotes 1) MUST be identified by quotation marks and b) MUST be indented and italicized
Examples
1. The main cause for the death of more than 90% of the corals on most reefs in the Indian Ocean in 1998 was high sea surface temperatures (Sheppard 2003).
2. All organisms take up energy and carbon to sustain life. (Starr and Taggart, 2001)
3. Several recent studies correlate the deterioration of coral reefs with to global warming, but more research is needed.
“During the past two decades, coral reefs have experienced extensive degradation worldwide. One etiology for this global degradation is a syndrome known as coral bleaching. Mass coral bleaching events are correlated with increased sea-surface temperatures, however, the cellular mechanism underlying this phenomenon is uncertain.” (Downs et al. 2002)
4. The coral eating snail Drupella cornus has been reported to cause severe damage at several sites in the Red Sea (Hassan et al., 2002)
2 “Literature Cited” section at the end of your report
A list of literature cited is necessary at the end of EVERY written assignment.
All sources
(Some of the main points are highlighted below)
List the publications alphabetically by last name of the author, then first name.
List ALL authors as they appear in the publication
After Author: Year in parenthesis.
Journal articles (printed or electronic journals)
Title of Publication (title of the article)
• Name of Journal (highlighted in blue below)
Volume (Issue) exact pages
Book chapters or conference proceedings (printed or electronic books)
Title of Publication (title and number of chapter)
• In: followed by Name of the Book (highlighted in green below)
• Name of editor(s) followed by (ed.) or (eds.) If the editor wrote the whole book, this is not necessary – See below for Starr ….
Publisher
Place published
Examples
Downs, Craig A.; Fauth, JE; Halas,JC; Dustan, P; Bemiss, J and Woodley CM (2002). Oxidative stress and seasonal coral bleaching. Free Radical Biology & Medicine, Vol 33 (4): 533–543.
Hassan, Moshira; Kotb, MA and Al-Sofyani, A (2002). Status of Coral Reefs in the Red Sea - Gulf of Aden. In: Status of Coral Reefs of the World 2002. Wilkinson C (ed.) AIMS, Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, Townsville, Australia (pp 45-52)
Sheppard, Charles R. C. (2003). Predicted recurrences of mass coral mortality in the Indian Ocean. Nature Vol 425 (6955): 294-297
Starr, C. and R. Taggart (2001). Chapter 28 (pp490-491). In: Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life. (9th edition). Wadsworth Pub. Co., NY.
Using images in your paper
1 Citing images in the text (in-text citation)
Always add the source directly with the image (under or in the image itself).
If the image is made by yourself or from another unpublished source (for instance a friend) write the name of the photographer and the year (see figure 1).
|[pic] |
|Figure 1: River Nile, Sampling site 2 |
|Photo: Randa Gaballa, 2007 |
If the image is taken from a scholarly published source, add the in-text citation as for any other published source(see figure 2).
|[pic] |
|Figure 2: Wing of an insect |
|From Starr and Taggart (2006), figure 17-18b2 |
2 “Sources of images” section at the end of your report
You should always provide a list of the sources of photos/diagrams/ photographers at the end of the paper. This is a separate section titled “Sources of Images”, or “sources of Diagrams”.
Unpublished images
If you only use unpublished images, you need to provide a list of the photo(s) and the photographer(s). The sources of images can be sorted by author OR by figure
Examples (if image figure 1 and 2 were photographs taken by students)
Sort by photographer (alphabetically by last name of author)
Ashmawy, Mohamed Figures 2,5,6,7,9
Gaballa, Randa Figures 1,3,4,8,9, 10
Sort by figure (chronologically by number of figure)
Figure 1: Gaballa, Randa Place, Date of photo taken, etc
Figure 2: Ashmawy, Mohamed Place, Date of photo taken, etc
Published images, taken from scholarly sources
These can be images, photos, diagrams etc that are scanned or provided online (or otherwise) from scholarly sources including textbooks, or copied out of files of scholarly sources.
Details and formatting of the sources are done the same way as for the “Literature Cited” (see above). An example of how this is done is provided below.
Sort by figure number
Figure 1: Starr, C. and R. Taggart (2006). Figure 17-18b2 (p 275). Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life. (11th edition). Wadsworth Pub. Co., NY.
Figure 2: as above. Figure 21-12c (p 341)
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