Bio 353 - Marine Ecology

Scientific Literature Exercise:

The following contains a list of common errors in this assignment. You are provided this list to help you in your writing in future papers.

Common Mistakes:

  1. Do not use numbered or bulleted lists for references.
  1. The necessary parts of any citation of a publication from a scientific journal should include:
  2. Author names (listed for example as last name, first initials [e.g., Paine, R.T., Darwin, C.R., Carson, R.]), Year of Publication, Title of Article, Journal Name, Volume number, Page Numbers (e.g. 45-57).
  3. You may use any standard citation format that includes all the above parts, as long as your format is internally consistent.
  4. If the journal is online only: Volume and Pages can be omitted if the journal does not use them. But you must then use a standard online reference. A common format is “DOI format”. Example: doi: 10.1111/jeb 12968 (for a paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology) or (for a paper in PLoS One).
  1. Species and Genus must be italicized.
  2. Correct: Mytilus edulis (Genus capitalized, species epithet lower case). When you mention the same species again in your paper: M. edulis.
  1. Inconsistent format:
  2. The details of whether to italicize the journal name, punctuation, etc. must be consistent among all listed references.
  3. Examples: If you place the year of publication after the authors, you must do this for all citations. If you italicize the name of the journal, this must be done for all citations. This is true of any aspect of formatting/punctuation.
  1. “et al.”
  2. Avoid use of et al. in the bibliography (but do use it for parenthetical/in text citations!).
  3. et al. may be used in parenthetical citations within the text(e.g., Jones et al., 1989) when there are more than two authors.
  4. Only use et al. in the bibliography when there are many authors (at least 5, different citation formats have different criteria). But you need to be consistent in use. In general, it is recommended that you list all authors. For our purposes, if you cite a paper with more than 5 authors, you can use just the first author, initials, et al. instead of writing out all of the authors.
  5. Note: Improper use resulted in a small point deduction. No points were deducted if et al. was used correctly.
  1. Book sources are not allowed (for this assignment). Stated in the guidelines.
  2. Depending on the database and the criteria you chose, you may have gotten book and non-peer reviewed magazine articles. You need to be able to distinguish between them.
  3. Also keep in mind that books are usually not the original published source of a fact that you want to cite (for example citing a fact in a textbook).