Citations

Citations are important in that they give due credit to the original authors and also help to locate the article. Journals use their own preferred method for citations. It is important that authors learn the importance of each element of the citation and how it should be formatted for the specific journal for which they are contributing as it varies. There are many different citation formats, but they all contain similar components. The differences are in how each of the elements is presented. In this inter- chapter, we will be providing you with instructions for a citation format called Council of Science Editors (CSE) formatting that we want you to use for all citations in Biology 2120L. We’ve selected this format because it is fairly straight-forward and does not include any extra punctuation or formatting that could potentially complicate your citations. It is important that you learn the basics here so you become familiar with each element of the citation, paying attention to the subtle details of the formatting. If you ever submit a paper for publication, you’ll need to be able to modify your citations to match the formatting for the journal in which you hope to publish.

Citations – A Version of CSE Format

To help familiarize you with the formatting that we expect you to use in Biology 2120L, we will use the journal article that you read during Week 2 of the lab to provide you with examples.

Literature Cited (Bibliography)

Note that ALL authors are listed in the bibliography.

Voves KC, Mitchell TS, Janzen FJ. 2016. Does natural visual camouflage reduce turtle nest predation? The American Midland Naturalist. 176(1): 166-172.

In the example above, we have color-coded each element of the citation to help you identify each important piece of information.

• Green – Author last name then first and second initials (may only use first initial if second isn’t given). Commas only between authors with a period following the last author. No periods are used with the initials for the first and middle names.
• Black – Year published followed by a period.
• Blue – Name of the paper, article, etc. followed by a period or question mark (scientific names of organisms should be correctly formatted).
• Orange – The name of the journal where the paper was published followed by a period.
• Purple – Volume(edition) followed by a colon.
• Red – Page numbers followed by a period.

When the citation is included in your literature cited, references, or bibliography, it should appear as follows (without the color coding):

Voves KC, Mitchell TS, Janzen FJ. 2016. Does natural visual camouflage reduce turtle nest predation? The American Midland Naturalist. 176(1): 166-172.

In-Text Citations

When you reference your sources within the text of your paper, it is important that it is clearly identified so your readers can find the resource by looking at the literature cited section of the paper. In-text citations provide your readers with enough information to find the full citation in your literature cited section without taking up valuable space within the text of your paper. In this case, only the author and year are necessary. Follow the examples below to determine how to complete in- text citations based on the number of authors.

• If there is only one author on the paper, give the last name and year in parentheses, no punctuation. (Voves 2016)
• If there are two authors, give last name and last name and year in parentheses using the conjugate “and”, no punctuation. (Voves and Mitchell 2016)
• If there are more than two authors, give the last name of the first author followed by et al. then the year, with the only punctuation being the period after et al. (Voves et al. 2016). The example article above would be correctly cited using this format.

Primary Sources

Many times you will find a journal article in a database that is online, such as PubMed.gov. This is not the article’s original journal publication. You may need to search a bit further for the complete reference information. Usually all it takes is to open the full text.

• Found the article on: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16492480
• Click on the full text link and it will take you to: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0083672905720148
• Here you can find all the information you need as well as the content of the entire article.

How to Find Scientific References

It is easy to use an internet search engine to locate scientific references, but such a search can produce a lot of hits that are not part of the formal literature of science. For example, a google search on the plant hormone auxin provided links to more than 1.8 million sites; 16 of the first 20 were not part of the peer-reviewed, original scientific literature.

Searching scientific databases will filter out most non-scientific sites. To accurately look for a peer reviewed scientific article, you may want to look into Google Scholar, PubMed, Medline and Web of Science. For example, PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) is a US government database that indexes biomedical literature, including much biological research that is not immediately relevant to medicine. Searching for auxin on PubMed produced about 17,000 references, most from the peer-reviewed literature of science. One advantage of databases like PubMed or Biosis Previews (see below) is that they will often allow you to view the abstract (a short summary written by the authors) of each article, so you can get a good idea of the article’s contents before you go further and read more of the article.

Using the ISU Library

Once you locate an article you want to read using Google Scholar or PubMed, you will often discover that you cannot get the whole article, or that a publisher asks you to pay for the privilege. Using the ISU library’s links will allow you to access many of these articles for free. Working through ISU’s library link (www.lib.iastate.edu) gives you free access to a great deal of scientific literature. Entering auxin into the library link’s Quick Search box produced more than 30,000 references. Of those, 29, mostly books, are available in the library; 25,000 were from peer-reviewed journals, and full text for most was available on-line. Clicking a “Show only Peer-Reviewed Journals” button narrowed the list. Clicking on the title of one of those articles often takes you to the article or to a site where you can view and download the article for free.From ISU’s library link page you can link to other pages that permit you to search a variety of biological databases.

Click Article Indexes and Databases, then use Biology as the subject/research area. Biosis Previews (ISI) is a good place to start looking. As long as you work from a computer on the ISU network, you will have access to any material for which ISU has a license. If you link to the library from another network, you will have to register for on-campus access (click the On-Campus Access button at the upper left of many ISU Library pages).