BIOL 311 Advanced Methods in Organismal Biology

It's important to cite your sources for a variety of reasons. Citing your sources:

• Gives your work credibility by showing you've done your research
• Gives credit to the authors/creators of the sources you used
• Allows readers to go back to the original source
• Ensures you won't be accused of plagiarism!

Now you know why it's important to cite, check out the flow chart below for information on when to cite.

 

 

Citations describe information resources (ex. journal articles, books, web pages, etc.) in a standard format. Citations styles differ in how they present information, but they all include the following basic elements: the title of the resource, who wrote it (author and/or editor), when it was published, where and by whom it was published (journal name, city, host of web page, etc.).

The McGill Library Citation Guide has loads of additional information including choosing a style based on your subject, information about citation managemenet software including EndNote and Zotero, and an FAQ on Citing and Referencing.

Below are some basic examples of citations in APA 7 style for different types of resources. The APA official site has a much more extensive list of examples.

 

Journal Article

Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions in storybooks: A comparison of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185

 

Online only supplemental material to a journal article

Freeberg, T. M. (2019). From simple rules of individual proximity, complex and coordinated collective movement [Supplemental material]. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 133(2), 141–142. https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000181

 

Webpage with an individual author

Horovitz, B. (2021, October 19). Are you ready to move your aging parent into your home? AARP. https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/home-care/info-2021/caregiving-questions.html

 

Webpage with an organizational group author

World Health Organization. (2018, May 24). The top 10 causes of death. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death

 

Report by Government Agency, NGO, etc.

National Cancer Institute. (2019). Taking time: Support for people with cancer (NIH Publication No. 18-2059). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/patient-education/takingtime.pdf

 

ChatGPT

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

 

Note - For a work with up to 20 authors, include all of the names in the reference. When the work has 21 or more authors, include only the first 19 names, an ellipsis, and the final name.

 

In text citations in APA style can be either parenthetical ex. (Grady et al., 2019), or narrative ex. Grady et al. (2019).

 

Citing Information from Traditional Knowledge or Oral Traditions of Indigenous Peoples

If the information has been recorded and is recoverable by readers, cite it in the text and include a reference list entry in the correct format for that type of source. It's important to maintain the integrity of Indigenous perspectives. 

For Traditional Knowledge or Oral Traditions that are not recorded, provide as much detail in the in-text citation as is necessary to describe the content and to contextualize the origin of the information and use a variation of the personal communication citation. Capitalize most terms related to Indigenous Peoples. Because there is no recoverable source, a reference list entry is not used.

ex. We spoke with Anna Grant (Haida Nation, lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, personal communication, April 2019) about traditional understandings of the world by First Nations Peoples in Canada. She described . . .

More information on citing Personal Communications and Traditional Knowledge or Oral Traditions in APA 7.