BIOL 313 - Principles of Ecology

When citing...

...you acknowledge another person's ideas, whether you have quoted them directly or not. You are also trying to provide enough information for your reader to find the source that you consulted.  A citation provides brief details of the author and date of publication within your paper. It leads the reader to your Bibliography or Reference List.  A Bibliography or Reference List is a list at the end of your paper of all references used within your paper. Name-year format: references are sorted alphabetically by surname of the first author. A reference is a specially formatted description of the item from which you obtained your information.

Please note that in scientific writing, the preferred practice is to paraphrase and cite, rather than directly quoting from an article.

Use CSE Name-Year (Author-Date) style

There are many citation styles to choose from. For this course, you are asked to use Council of Science Editors (CSE) Name-Year (Author-Date) style. If you are familiar with APA style, this one will look quite similar. CSE actually has 3 styles (the other two are called Citation-Name and Citation-Sequence), so be sure to select Name-Year if selecting a CSE style in a software program such as Zotero.

For specific guidance on formatting citations, consult this CSE citation guide:

Zotero is a free software program that helps you create a personal library of saved documents and cite them in your paper using any recognized citation style. Organize your records in folders, tag them, attach the PDF to the record, and make use of Zotero's annotation and highlighting tools. Zotero has a browser plug-in that allows you to import records as you find articles online, and it integrates with Word and Google Docs to add properly formatted in-text references and bibliographies as you write your paper.

Need help getting started? See Zotero Documentation. This YouTube video offers an excellent guide for beginners. 

Just need to generate a quick citation? ZoteroBib is a leaner, web-based tool that generates citations based on a URL, DOI, PMID, etc.

Note: Zotero-generated citations are only as good as the metadata in the record. It is your responsibility to check your reference list for errors and missing information, and go back into Zotero and correct the record if necessary. 

Pro tip: If using Zotero software, do not fix errors in Word; your reference list is overwritten by Zotero every time you add a new citation. If you see an error in your Word reference list, you need to fix the information in Zotero itself. 

NEED HELP? Contact your librarian at Heather.Ganshorn@ucalgary.ca.