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BIO 1210L Foundations of Biology

Avoid Plagiarism - Cite Your Sources

Why cite your sources?

  • Give credit to the creators of the information you used in your papers, presentations, and projects
  • Add credibility to your argument or assertions
  • Avoid committing plagiarism
  • Share the sources you found with other researchers

For more information about avoiding plagiarism, visit CPP's Student Conduct and Integrity website.

Which citation style do you use for BIO 1210L?

  • For BIO 1210L, you will be using APA Style.
  • See your Lab 3 handout for examples of citations that follow APA Style.

How to cite your sources?

Looking for a thorough citation tutorial? Check out the University Library's existing guide on citations!

Are you using APA – the style of documentation from the American Psychological Association? Watch the following videos!

See examples and guidance from Purdue OWL for using APA style:

Citation tools can make life easier!

Gather many references with a reference manager such as Zotero or EndNote. A reference manager can quickly create a bibliography for you, and you can choose from a variety of citation styles. Or create one or a few quick citations with these tools:

Citation tools and reference management tools are a big help. But beware: You should review the citations for accuracy and correct formatting. Ultimately, you are responsible for the citations that you submit for an assignment, not the citation tool.

Understanding Bibliographic Citations -- Update with APA Style (June 2018)

Bibliographic citations are strings of data that specify the existence of publications. 

Examples:

Encyclopedia of Live Foods book cover Book:

Masters, C.O. 1975. Encyclopedia of live foods. Neptune City, NJ: T.F.H. Publications.

General format: Author (first author last name, first initials, followed by others first initials, last name). Year. Title. Place of Publication: Publisher.

  
Journal of Experimental Botany cover

 

Article:

Moyle, R., D.J. Fairbairn, J. Ripi, M. Crowe, and J.M. Botella. 2005.  Developing pineapple fruit has a small transcritome dominated by metallothionen. Journal of Experimental Botany 56:101-112.

General Format: Author (first author last name, first initials, followed by others first initials, last name). Year. Title. Name of Journal Volume Number: Page Numbers.

  

 

In the above example of an article citation, we can make out the names of the authors, the year of publication, the title of the article and the name of the journal.

Also, we have the puzzling numbers "56:101-112." If you think about the physical nature of a periodical article, you know that they tend to occupy a range of pages, and what better way to express that range of pages by using a range of numbers (like 101-112)? But what about the "56"? In general, a bibliographic citation for an article goes from unit: subunit. In this case, the "unit" in question is a volume number. 

You can see that the article citation has a level of complexity not present in the book citation.  Whenever you have two titles (one for the article, and one for the journal) and a range of numbers (representing a distinct range of pages), we have a citation specifying a subunit (the article) within a larger unit (a journal), you probably have a citation to an article.1

You can often get useful citations from the bibliographies (also called "References" or "Literature Cited") at the end of scholarly articles. You can also get them from searching in databases (see the "Articles" tab above ). 

There are many different styles of bibliographic citations. For this lab, you will be using a modified version of the Name-Year format for end references used in the book Scientific Style and Format, from the Council of Science Editors2

  _________________________

1It could also be a chapter in a book, but that is far less common.
2Council of Science Editors. 2014. Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors and Publishers. 8th ed.  See page 551 and onward for details.

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