Bibliography Assignment

Now that you've found relevant journals your task becomes more focused, you'll need to find actual articles relevant to your proposal. Frequently you can use the methods described in the pervious assignment, only in this case you're searching for more detailed information. Specifically, you'll be searching for the author, date, title of the article, journal title, volume, and pages in which the article appears. For example, the following is a typical reference for a scientific paper with the components noted for your benefit.

Note particularly the punctuation and that the journal title is italicized. This is the standard scientific format for citations of journal articles. Citations differ for books, chapters within edited volumes, and other publications.

Please see your instructors with any questions you might have regarding format.

The Assignment: Compile a bibliography (list of published paper citations) of peer-reviewed journal articles that are directly related to your research. You must find at least 25 references, though you will want to be as thorough as possible in your literature search, so more is better. Be cognizant of the history of your discipline and try to reflect it in your search. For example, if your proposal is on comparative genomics, you won't find any papers prior to 1989 as the discipline did not exist. However, if your proposal involves organismal biology (e.g., physiology, evolution, etc.), you may very well find relevant papers dating from the 1800's. Try to balance your bibliography with new articles as well as historically important ones.

Make sure that you include your name and research question at the top of your bibliography.

Comments: A bibliography is a critical resource to keep up to date for your research interests. It allows you to find papers more quickly and remain organized throughout the research project. You can keep a bibliography in many formats, the most simple of which is a word-processing document that simply lists them (frequently alphabetically or by sub-topic). You might also wish to explore the use of specialized software products that interface with word processing documents (e.g., EndNote, Reference Manager, etc.). While either option is acceptable, software-based reference managers are highly useful as they allow automated formatting of references to suit the needs of any situation. If you're an aspiring scientist, we highly recommend starting two files of this type as early as possible. One should be a list of relevant citations, while the other should be a bibliography of all the articles you keep in your personal library.

Popular Reference Software:

·         EndNote

·         Reference Manager

·         RefWorks (available on the FGCU Library website)