Citing References

What is a journal article?

Biologists publish the results from their experiments so that they can reach a broader audience. One way that scientists share their work is by publishing articles in research journals. Other scientists read research articles to learn about recent discoveries and to help inspire their work.

Initially research journals were only available as printed volumes and issues that contained several different articles compiled together. Now, rather than pull the printed journal off the library shelf, we can use online data bases to find articles. The articles we find online often still have the information about where to find them in their printed form (Journal title, volume, page numbers), and we need to report that in our writing.

We must use references to support our own experiments and we must always acknowledge the sources of information that we did not generate ourselves. This is important for academic integrity and research ethics. It is also useful to provide your reader with citations to related studies that they may be interested in reviewing themselves.

Reference Formatting:

Every scientific journal has its own guidelines for how to format reference citations. In BIO131 lab, we will use APA formatting, which is similar to the format used by many journals of organismal biology.

Citing Journal Articles in Text

Scientists cite information from other published articles in their articles to provide background or to provide explanatory, supporting, or contrasting data for their research.

In biology, we rephrase information from published articles in our own words, rather than use direct quotations. We make it clear to our readers that the information came from another source by citing the source in parentheses after the sentence.  

References in the text are cited using the (Author, Year) format. The way that you report author last names in your in-text citations depends on how many authors there are:

• One author – (Jones, 2015)

• Two authors – (Jones and Kane, 2018)

• Three or more authors – (Jones et al., 1999)  *et al = abbreviation meaning "and others" in Latin

See below for an example of how information from references can be used in the Introduction and Discussion Sections of a scientific report and how in-text citations are used.

Citing Journal Articles in a Reference List

Every journal article that you use in the text of your scientific report needs to be added to a Reference list at the end of your report. Information about the journal article needs to be cited in a very specific way:

Last Name1, Initials., Last Name2, Initials., and Last Name3, Initials. (Year). Article Title.  Journal Name. Volume, Page Number-Page Number.

Examine the example reference list below. Can you identify all the components of the citations?

Citing Textbooks in a Reference List

Editor Last Name.  (Year). Book Title.  Edition.  (Page Number-Page Number where citation found). City, State. Publisher.

Campbell (2013). Biology, 10th Edition (pp. 48-52). New York, NY: Pearson.

Citing Textbooks in Text

(Editor Last Name, Year)

(Campbell, 2013)