Guidelines for Literature Citations in a Scientific Paper

In addition to the general guidelines set forth in “Davidson College Department of Biology Statement on Plagiarism”, use these specific guidelines when preparing written work for this course.

Direct quotations are rarely, if ever, used in scientific papers. So, you should not use any in your work. In a nutshell, you must synthesize the information that you have read and then write about it in your own words. You might think that there is no better way or even no different way to say it other than what your source has. This is not true. Think about what point your sentence is making, and then say it out loud as if you were explaining it to a friend. Translate the scientific jargon into regular English.

You must then cite the reference from which you obtained your information, in the body of the text, as close to where you write about it as possible. A good practice is to cite once at the end of the first sentence in which you use information from that source and then again at the end of the paragraph, if the source you took the information from has not changed in the preceding sentences. If you change sources, then you must cite that new source. Err on the side of too many citations. I will be looking for a minimum of two citations per paragraph in your written work.

For this course, you must use the (Name, Year) format for in text citations, referring to the citation in the text at the end of the sentence. Follow the format of the following examples:

(Dahlquist, 2004), one author

(Dahlquist & Puglisi, 2000), two authors

(Dahlquist et al., 2002), more than two authors

DO NOT USE (Dahlquist, page 1000)

If you want to use the authors of a paper as the subject of your sentence, you can say:

“Dahlquist (2004) showed that…”

“Dahlquist and Puglisi (2000) showed that…”

“Dahlquist et al. (2002) showed that…”

The references section at the end of your paper should list the full citations for each work cited in the text of the paper and no others. List the citations in alphabetical order by the first author’s last name. Do not change the order of the authors of a paper. Follow the format of the following examples.

A full citation for a journal article includes: author(s), year published, title, journal, volume, page numbers.

Dahlquist, K.D., Salomonis, N., Vranizan, K., Lawlor, S.C., & Conklin, B.R. (2002) GenMAPP, A New Tool for Viewing and Analyzing Microarray Data on Biological Pathways. Nature Genetics 31:19-20.

A full citation for a book includes: authors(s), year published, title, publishing company, location of publisher, page numbers.

Baxevanis, B.D. & Ouelette, B.F.F. (2005) Bioinformatics: A Practical Guide to the Analysis of Genes and Proteins, 3rd edition, Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 253–291.

A full citation for a web site includes: the author of the web site, the date last updated, the name of web site, the URL listed like this, <http://www.vassar.edu>, and date accessed.

University of California, Santa Cruz (2001) Human Genome Browser Guide <http://genome.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/help/hgTracksHelp.html>. Accessed 19 March 2002.

You should only cite references that you have personally read. If you are citing information from an article that has cited another article for it, cite the one you read. You can say:

(Dahlquist et al., 2002, cited in Baxevanis and Ouelette, 2005)