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Biology

See KPU Library's guide to the 7th edition of APA Style for details on how to correctly cite sources in your writing.

The APA Style Site contains helpful information on the following:

Here's a quick overview of why citations are important in your writing.

Use a citation manager to keep track of your sources and help creating your reference lists. The 2 below are highly-recommended. Ask your librarian for more information.

Zotero is a free browser tool that keeps track of your articles and webpages, and creates citations in several formats. Sign up for a free account, and your personal library will be accessible from any computer with an internet connection.

For help learning how to use Zotero, please visit Zotero.org for downloading and support.

Also available for free, Mendeley allows you to import articles from supported websites as well as stored on your local device, making them accessible from anywhere. Creates references and bibliographies in many styles.

In this box, we'll consider the importance of integrating sources into your writing and how to do this correctly within the conventions of science communication. But first it's useful to consider the BIG PICTURE....

It helps to keep a couple of things in mind as you start to write you lab reports and papers:

  • Scholarship is like a conversation Research and scholarly writing within a particular field is like an ongoing conversation, with experts and professionals building upon one another's work, and what has come before. It is also a space where different perspectives are examined, and where new questions may be asked. As a newcomer to the conversation, you are developing an awareness of sources, evidence, and methods specific to your field. It is also important to recognize your own role in contributing to this conversation as a writer or creator of content.
  • Information has value With so much information so freely available, it is easy to forget that information has value, both in the sense that it is a commodity protected by legal frameworks (copyright), and a means of education, influence, and navigating the world. The ethical use of information involves acknowledging the work of others by employing the conventions of citation within a field. By using these conventions, you demonstrate that you are a part of a community that is engaged in discovering and disseminating knowledge around a given a topic.

This short video from the West Virginia University Libraries introduces the idea of the scholarly conversation and your place in it.

Why Citations are Important

In science communication, include citations to external and reliable sources in order to:

  • increase the credibility of your own work
  • provide your reader with additional sources of information
  • acknowledge the work of others who have gone before you
  • ensure that your work is transparent and unbiased

Direct Quotation, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

There are certain conventions in science writing that make it a little different from other academic and non-academic writing:

  • Rarely, if ever, are direct quotations taken from other work. This is largely because the actual words an author uses is not so important, whereas their findings and theories are.
  • Paraphrasing the work of others is done by carefully altering sentence structure and terminology while adhering to the original meaning.
  • Most often, when writing your lab reports and research papers, you will be summarizing the works of others.

Here are a few resources to help you understand the correct way to incorporate sources of information into your science writing.

The following templates can provide useful phrases for incorporating your sources into your writing. They are based on the templates from the book cited below and have been adapted for writing in the sciences.

Graff, G. & Birkenstein, C. (2013). “They say/ I say”: The moves that matter in academic writing (3rd ed.). Norton.