Information Literacy Tutorial for the Biological & Biomedical Sciences

Please keep the following in mind:

Quinnipiac Biological Sciences and Biomedical Sciences use the Council of Scientific Editors (CSE) Style, Name-Year method.

Use the published PDF form of articles whenever possible, and cite them as if they were PRINT, regardless of how you accessed them.

Why cite your sources?

You’re probably aware that giving credit for others’ ideas, words, graphs, and pictures in your work is a big part of avoiding plagiarism.  But take a moment to consider how citing sources properly contributes positively to the world’s knowledge.

Scientists “converse” and communicate with each other through posters, articles, conference presentations and proceedings, scholarly books (monographs) and sometimes social media.  For simplicity, the rest of this discussion will say “article,” although the points apply equally to any form of scientific communication.  Scientists report on experimental methods, results, discoveries, and replication of others’ findings.  Reputable science journalists read these sources and often interview the researchers/authors and other experts in that field of science to get the information for their news and popular articles.

In all of this communication, readers, whether other scientists or non-scientists, need to know the basis of the research.  That is, what is the background, what have other scientists done and found, what alternatives have the researchers/authors considered when designing their experiments and interpreting their results. 

Showing the basis of your research is as much of the work of science as designing and conducting experiments and reporting on your findings.

The combination of in-text citations and the list of references (or sometimes, the footnotes) provide precise information about who contributed which ideas and information to an article.  You are not only giving those who went before you in a line of research credit for their work, you are setting your work apart, which in turn will be given credit by those who come after you.

Have you ever run across an interesting fact or technique while reading an article and wanted to know more about it?  The reference trail allows you to find the original article that the researcher/author you’re reading mentioned.  The in-text citation’s brief information directs you to the full entry in the references.  In the references, you find all the details you need to find the source article and read it for yourself.  You can then work with that fact or technique as reported directly from its originating author, and your use or interpretation may be different from that of the researcher/author of the article where you first found the citation.

Following “trails” of references backward or forward in time allows you to see how knowledge of a topic evolves over time.  Many databases such as Scopus or PubMed, provide “cited by…” lists of newer articles that cite the article you’re reading.  An important article will have a lot of other articles citing it, once it’s been available for a year or more and other researchers/authors read it and incorporate it into their own work.

So why do you need to learn so many citation styles?  While you’re at Quinnipiac, you are studying a variety of disciplines – humanities, science, social science, engineering, business.  Over time, each discipline developed its own standard for identifying sources in articles.  Each discipline uses different types of sources and assigns higher importance to different details within the citation.  For example, while MLA (humanities), APA (social sciences) and CSE (biological and biomedical sciences) all put primary importance on the authors of an article, MLA puts the page number in the in-text citation.  When an author is analyzing a literary text, the exact location of the sentence under discussion is more relevant than the year the work being analyzed was published.  (Why Are…c2018) In contrast, CSE and APA favor the publication year because scientists need to rapidly assess the currency of information.  Similarly, the order and presentation (italics, punctuation, capitalization) of details within each citation list item reflect how scholars and practitioners in that discipline find important when scanning a list of sources. As you progress through your studies, you will gain the experience and practice to become comfortable with the main citation style of your discipline.  Since more and more research is interdisciplinary, expect to use other disciplines’ citation styles when you work together with researchers from other disciplines.  Never fear, there is a variety of tools to help you manage citations and the details of the styles.

So now I hope you’ll remember the positive contribution that citing sources makes in advancing the world’s knowledge.  Citing others’ work correctly isn’t just another arbitrary rule to avoid disciplinary action, but a way to take your place in the community of scientific scholars, researchers, and authors.

Reference

Yale Center for Teaching & Learning. c2018. New Haven (CT): Yale Center for Teaching & Learning. Why Are there Different Citation Styles? [accessed 2018 Aug 14]; [about 12 paragraphs]. https://ctl.yale.edu/writing/using-sources/why-are-there-different-citation-styles.

In keeping with these values [five fundamental values: honesty, trust, responsibility, fairness, and respect], Quinnipiac University expects its community members to comply with the usual expectations for honest academic work. In general, community members

    • must properly cite sources in all papers

      The above is taken from the Academic Integrity Policy
         Quinnipiac University, Revised November 10, 2007

Please remember that plagiarism applies not only to:

• taking the exact wording from a source
  
  but also to:
• paraphrasing
• taking someone’s idea
• presenting someone’s work as your own, while not giving credit to the original author

      For assistance with your papers and presentations, please contact the Learning Center in the north wing of the Library building. They provide a great amount of help with citation questions.

Link to the Academic Integrity Policy page.

Scientific Style and Format is the manual for CSE Style.  It includes directions for writing and formatting various kinds of scientific communication such as scholarly articles and posters, and conventions for using scientific terms in scholarly writing.  Instructions for creating in-text citations and reference list items for numerous types of sources are given.

1. Conduct a search
2. Mark records you wish to save by checking them off
3. Click on Export at top of results list
4. Dropdown select RefWorks under Reference managers
5. Then click on Export

Now in RefWorks

       6. Open  RefWorks

       7. Click +Add from the top left toolbar

       8. Select "Import References"

       9. Select a file from your computer.  Downloads - Select Scopus

       9. RIS Format : Select RIS Format: Scopus, click Import

      10. Check off the citations you want to put in a folder.

      11. In the top row, click on Assign to folder. Under Assign to folder, check off the folder where you want to keep these citations. To start a new folder, select Create at the bottom. Name the folder. You can create a folder as a subfolder of another one if you wish. Click Create folder.

1. Conduct a search
2. Mark records you wish to save by checking them off
3. Click on "save"  from the options just below the search bar
4. Under Save Citations to file, Selection should default to Selection, Format: Dropdown select  PubMed,
5. Click Create a file. (The file you download will always look like this "pubmed-XXX-set.txt" and the file type will be .txt)

Now in RefWorks

       6. Open  RefWorks

       7. Click +Add from the top left toolbar

       8. Select "Import References"

       9. In the "Import from a file" space, drag or select the .txt file from PubMed into the Import from a file space.   If you cannot find the file in your downloads, try searching by file type (.txt)

    10. A new window will appear titled "What is the format of this file?" -- RefWorks will suggest NLM PubMed Format

      11. Click Import

      12. On the next page, you will be asked to select your Import Options. Here, you can assign your new references to an existing folder if you so wish. If you do not designate a specific folder, your references will be added to your Not in Folder folder.

      13. Click Import to finish the process.

      14. The page will reload and will confirm that the citation has been imported.

You can also type in the title of the article into the Library OneSearch.  Use the instructions from Library OneSearch to Export .  

Library OneSearch:

1. Conduct a search
2. Click onicon to right of the title 
3. Go to folder icon on top next to search button 
4. Click on dropdown under Export As, click on RefWorks
5. Click on Import
6. Click on Go to Last Imported
7. Check off the citations you want to put in a folder.
8. In the top row, click on Assign to folder. Under Assign to folder, check off the folder where you want to keep these citations. To start a new folder, select Create at the bottom. Name the folder. You can create a folder as a subfolder of another one if you wish. Click Create folder.