Scientific papers usually contain citations or references to the relevant studies published by scientists and researchers. These references help readers to identify the sources of the cited items. It is a legal and ethical obligation of a writer to acknowledge the work of others that have been used to develop ideas and substantiate one's own findings. The knowledge of citing references properly is an essential element of good scientific writing.
Writing term and research papers require using different sources, such as books, journal articles, and information available on the Web, and these sources should be cited in your papers or reports following a standard format.
This manual has been prepared to help you learn:
- How to cite primary and secondary sources of sci-tech literature in text;
- How to cite electronic resources in text;
- How to prepare the "Literature cited" or "References" section of a scientific paper/report.
The basic format described in this manual has been adopted from the conventions used in the CSE Style Manual. The 2006 edition of the CSE manual covers “a wide variety of disciplines in experimental and observational science, with emphasis on the physical and life sciences.” Although the CSE Style Manual provides the formats for documenting certain types of materials (e.g., books, journals, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations), it lacks the examples for citing communications from blogs, wikis and email.
Types of Formats Used in CSE
The CSE Style Manual recommends three systems of documenting citations. They are: Name and Year (N-Y), Citation-Sequence(C-S), and Citation-Name (C-N). Regardless of the documentation system you choose to use for your paper, place each citation immediately after the work or study that is mentioned in the text .