Documenting your Sources
In your lab reports you will typically use information
from sources such as your textbook, lab manual, a reference book, and
articles published in a science or engineering journal. When you use information
from sources, you need to tell the readers where the information came
from and where the readers can locate the sources. This is what citations
and references are for.
A citation tells the readers where the information
came from. In your writing, you cite or refer to the source of information.
A reference gives the readers details about the source
so that they have a good understanding of what kind of source it is and
could find the source themselves if necessary. The references are typically
listed at the end of the lab report.
There are many different forms of documentation (systems
of citation and reference), varying across academic fields. You may be
familiar with MLA (Modern Language Association) used in English or CBE
(Council of Biological Editors) used in the life sciences. But even within
academic fields there are different forms because different scholarly
journals specify a system to be used in those journals.
Smart Advice:
Find out what form of documentation is appropriate to use in your class
before you write your first report. The best place to look is
the lab manual. If you don't see the form of documentation given there,
then ask the lab instructor or the professor of the lecture section.
More smart advice:
If you can't find out from the lab manual or the teacher what form of
documentation you should use, or if you are told to choose one on your
own, find out what scholarly journal is appropriate to the field you
are studying and use it as a guide to documentation. Find a recent copy
of journal in the library or online. It will say what form that it uses
(in the "guide to authors"). But you can also determine what
to do by looking at how the citations and references are done in an
article in the journal.
Generally speaking, there are three basic systems of documentation
in science and engineering: the name-and-year system, the
alphabet-number system, and the citation-order system. If your
teacher says to use one of these systems, you can use the following brief
descriptions to guide you in documenting sources:
The name-and-year system.
Citations: When you cite the source of information
in the report, you give the names of the authors and the date of publication.
Jenkins and Busher (1979) report that beavers eat several kinds
of herbaceous plants as well as the leaves, twigs, and bark of most
species of woody plants that grow near water.
Beavers have been shown to be discriminate eaters
of hardwoods (Crawford, Hooper, and Harlow 1976).
References: The sources are listed at the end of
the report in alphabetical order according to the last name of the first
author, as in the following book and article.
Crawford, H.S., R.G. Hooper, and R.F Harlow. 1976. Woody Plants Selected
by Beavers in the Appalachian and Valley Province. Upper Darby, PA:
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Jenkins, S.H., and P.E. Busher. 1979. Castor canadensis.
Mammalian Species. 120:1-8.
The alphabet-number system.
Citations: When you cite the source of information
in the report, you give a number in parentheses that corresponds to
the number of the source in the alphabetical listing in the "References."
Jenkins and Busher report that beavers eat several kinds of herbaceous
plants as well as the leaves, twigs, and bark of most species of
woody plants that grow near water (4).
Beavers have been shown to be discriminate eaters
of hardwoods (3).
References: The sources are listed in alphabetical
order and numbered accordingly, as in the following book and article.
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3.
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Crawford, H.S., R.G. Hooper, and R.F Harlow. 1976. Woody Plants
Selected by Beavers in the Appalachian and Valley Province. Upper
Darby, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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4.
|
Jenkins, S.H., and P.E. Busher. 1979. Castor canadensis.
Mammalian Species. 120:1-8. |
The Citation-Order System (typically used in engineering--IEEE
documentation).
Citations: When you cite the sources of information
in the report, you give a number in brackets that corresponds to the
number of the source listed in the order in which they appear in the
report, the source listed first as [1], the next source [2], etc.
Jenkins and Busher report that beavers eat several kinds of herbaceous
plants as well as the leaves, twigs, and bark of most species of
woody plants that grow near water [1].
Beavers have been shown to be discriminate eaters
of hardwoods [2].
References: The sources are listed in the order
in which they are cited in the report, as in the following book and article.
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[1]
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S.H. Jenkins and P.E. Busher, "Castor canadensis,"Mammalian
Species. Vol. 20, Jan. 1979.
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|
[2]
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H.S. Crawford, R.G. Hooper, and R.F Harlow, Woody
Plants Selected by Beavers in the Appalachian and Valley Province.
Upper Darby, PA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1976. |
Documentation on the Internet:
Help for using the
documentation system of the Council of Biological Editors (for life
sciences). The source is the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin.
Help for using the
documentation system of the American Chemical Society (for chemistry
classes). The source is the Lehigh University Library.
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