Health Sciences

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.

Find out more

Visit the library's Academic Integrity and Plagiarism Guide.
 

Summon citation tool

The library's Summon search, as well as many of its research databases, have built-in citation generators for creating citations and permanent folders for saving your search results.

In Summon, look for the quotation marks next to the result in the search results list. Be sure to select the appropriate citation style from the drop-down.

Use the tool to copy and paste the entries into your reference list, but make sure to double-check for accuracy and completion. Consult the Library's citation guides when you are preparing your final draft to make sure the formatting and details are correct.

Zotero citation tool

For a free tool that will help you collect, organize, cite, and share research, consider using Zotero. The library has a Zotero guide for installing and getting started using Zotero on your own device.