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Chemistry

This guide is made to help students and faculty access credible resources in chemistry.

Use this page for help understanding plagiarism, creating citations, and exploring writing resources.

Why is citing sources important?

There are many reasons why citing sources is important. Here are three compelling reasons:

  1. Not providing citations is plagiarism, which can carry big academic consequences. Learn more about plagiarism from the SLCC "Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities."
  2. It is respectful to the authors whose information you are using. Think about it this way: You write a really awesome blog post about something you are truly passionate about and have spent much time developing. Then someone else on the Internet copies your post and passes it off as their own ideas (aka. they didn't cite you). This is very disrespectful to you, your time and effort, and your ideas.
  3. It helps your readers - often your professor - find your sources quickly so they can learn more about your topic. Specific formats, like APA or MLA, provide a common language for making this possible.

Use Databases' Built-in Citation Generators

The majority of the Library's databases, including Summon, have built-in citation generators. These help you to easily retrieve citations for your sources. Both Google Scholar and PubMed Central also have citation generators.

Note: Always consider the citations you pull from any citation generator to be drafts. You should review the citation for accuracy. You may need to fix spacing, indentation, capitalization, the number of authors listed in the citation, and URLs or DOIs. If you are using APA, for example, a common error is that the citation generator will capitalize every word in the article's title. Instead, APA uses sentence case, where you capitalize only the first words of titles and subtitles and proper nouns.

Once you've selected an article, look for the "Cite" tool. In some databases, including Google Scholar and ProQuest Central, this looks like a quotation marks (" ") icon. The image below shows how the citation generator looks in Summon.

Quotation marks citation generator icon in Summon

 

Citation Resources

Online Citation Guides

Citation Style Handbooks

Want to hone your research skills?

Contact the Science, Mathematics and Engineering liaison librarian: Amy.Scheelke@slcc.edu.