BIOL 1004 FYE: Citing Sources Manually

APA, or the American Psychological Association, uses one of the most well-known citation styles.  Detailed information about using this style is available in the APA Style Guide (shown below), but you can also find information on the web about using the APA style:

• APA Tutorial "The Basics of APA Style"
• VT Libraries APA Webpage
• Purdue Online Writing Lab Website 

MLA, or the Modern Language Association, provides another well-known citation style, used frequently within the Liberal Arts and Humanities. Detailed information is available in the MLA style guide, whose call number and library location is listed on the VT Libraries MLA webpage below, but you can also find information online about using MLA style:

• VT Libraries MLA webpage
• Purdue Online Writing Lab Website

Even more citation styles - the VT Libraries Citation and Style Manuals page provides descriptions of many more frequently used styles, each of which also link to resources for using the style:

• VT Libraries Citation and Style Manuals webpage

--> EXAMPLES for BIOL 1004 assignment

For the assignment in this class, you need to be able to both understand how to read citations and create citations.  You'll be creating citations according to the APA guidelines--see the information at the left for how to do this.

However, as you read through your articles and try to use bibliographies in order to find additional articles, you'll be coming across a lot of different citation styles.  The example citation below, is in APA style. Citation styles, while they may look different, all contain the same basic information, and it's useful to become familiar with identifying key information from any type of citation:

Test yourself: Use the information in the citation above to search for the full text of the article.  See the box below for more information about how to do this!

When you have a citation for an article that you're trying to find, there are a couple of different ways you can try to track down the article.

1.  Use the VT Libraries home page search, powered by EDS Discovery Search. Discovery Search can link you directly to articles.  Simply type in the full title of the article (such as: "W.G. Sebald: The Pleasure and Pain of Beauty"). If we have access to the article, Summon will link you to it via 'Articles' results. Tip: If you get too many results that don't look like the right one, such as when searching for an article with a very general title, try adding the author's last name to the search with AND between the author name and the title (such as: Duttlinger AND "W.G. Sebald: The Pleasure and Pain of Beauty")

2.  Check the journal subscription.  If using Summon to find the article doesn't work, then you'll want to check and see if we subscribe to the journal that the article is from.  In the example above, the journal title is German Life and Letters.  In order to see if we have access to that journal, I will use the journal search linked from the Collections menu on the library website:

3.  Contact your librarian!

Examples in APA style:

Journal Articles

*Tips: (a) APA citation asks you to include different information depending on the number of authors for the article (b) If no page numbers, leave that information out. If at all possible, include the article DOI.

De Vito, J., Chivers, D. P., Kiesecker, J. M., Belden, L. K., & Blaustein, A. R. (1999). Effects of snake predation on  aggregation and metamorphosis of Pacific treefrog (Hyla regilla) larvae. Journal of Herpetology, 33(3) 504-507. doi: 10.2307/1565654

Capelluto, D. G., Zhao, X., Lucas, A., Lemkul, J. A., Xiao, S., Fu, X., ... & Finkielstein, C. V. (2014). Biophysical and Molecular-Dynamics Studies of Phosphatidic Acid Binding by the Dvl-2 DEP Domain. Biophysical Journal, 106(5), 1101-1111. doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2014.01.032

Reference Sources

National Center for O*NET Development. (2016). Genetic Counselors. In O*Net OnLine (Summary report No. 29-9092.00). Retrieved from https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/29-9092.00.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2015). Genetic Counselors. In Occupational Outlook Handbook, Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/genetic-counselors.htm