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BIOZ 310: Genetics Lab

Citing with Technology or by Hand

Checking your References

 General Check for Any Citation Style

  • Did you cite everything, including figures and images, that you did not create?
  • Is everything cited in your text included in the Liturature Cited?
  • Is everything listed in the Literature Cited cited somewhere in your text?
  • Does every citation include complete information?
  • Are all of your citations formatted the same way?

Specific Check for the Genetics Format (after you're pretty sure you've followed examples in Genetics Instructions for Authors)

  • Do your in-text citations include the authors' surname(s) and the year in parentheses?
  • Is your Literature Cited organized alphabetically by the surname of the first author of each article?
  • Are all of your citations in the Literature Cited organized consistently with authors names, followed by year, then (article and journal) titles, then volume number, and ending with page numbers?
  • Is et al. italicized wherever it's used?
  • Do you use et al. for in-text citations any time there were more than two authors but in the Literature Cited reserve et al. only for items with more than five authors and even then only for the sixth and later authors?
  • In the text, are there semicolons between citations if you include more than one source in a single citation. 
  • In the Literature Cited, did you use the authors' initials instead of their first and middle names?
  • Are there spaces between the letters of the authors' initials?
  • Are there commas between the autors' names, even when there are only two authors?
  • Is there a comma between the authors' names and the year?
  • Is there no punctuation between the year and the article title?
  • Did you use sentence-style capitalization for article titles?
  • Did you properly capitalize and italicize species names and non-English words in article titles?
  • Did you use title-style capitalization for journal and book titles?
  • Are book titles italicized but journal titles left in plain text?
  • Is there a period at the end of an article title, before the beginning of a journal title?
  • Are you consistent in abbreviating journal titles?
  • Is there a colon after the volume number and a space after the colon?
  • Are the page numbers listed in full, e.g. 702-716?