What are the main sources of information and references that needs citation?
Different subject disciplines call for citation information to be written in very specific order, capitalization, and punctuation. There are therefore many different style formats. Three popular citation formats are MLA Style (for humanities articles) and APA or Chicago (for social sciences articles). Show MLA style (print journal article): Whisenant, Warren A. "How Women Have Fared as Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Since the Passage of Title IX." Sex Roles 49, no. 3 (2003): 179-182. In your lab reports you will typically use information from sources such as your textbook, lab manual, a reference book, and articles published in a science or engineering journal. When you use information from sources, you need to tell the readers where the information came from and where the readers can locate the sources. This is what citations and references are for. A citation tells the readers where the information came from. In your writing, you cite or refer to the source of information. A reference gives the readers details about the source so that they have a good understanding of what kind of source it is and could find the source themselves if necessary. The references are typically listed at the end of the lab report. There are many different forms of documentation (systems of citation and reference), varying across academic fields. You may be familiar with MLA (Modern Language Association) used in English or CBE (Council of Biological Editors) used in the life sciences. But even within academic fields there are different forms because different scholarly journals specify a system to be used in those journals.
Generally speaking, there are three basic systems of documentation in science and engineering: the name-and-year system, the alphabet-number system, and the citation-order system. If your teacher says to use one of these systems, you can use the following brief descriptions to guide you in documenting sources: The name-and-year system.Citations: When you cite the source of information in the report, you give the names of the authors and the date of publication. The alphabet-number system.
The Citation-Order System (typically used in engineering--IEEE documentation).
Documentation on the Internet:
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