Sciencemadness Discussion Board

What are those things called? References, or scholarly articles --

Yttrium2 - 11-6-2021 at 02:30

I've seen it before, where someone on a messaging board asks for a "journal" IIRC, or a reference (IIRC) -- Are these the same things as scholarly articles?


Who is the person responsible for finding the references, journals, scholarly articles, or whatever they are called? I think journal???

Are they librarians, or do what, do they have access to all of the books? How can they pull up the information, who specializes in retrieving these types of information?



Thank you

Chemgineer - 11-6-2021 at 10:44

I would call them References and they might be Scientific Papers, Books or Journals. That's just me though.

andy1988 - 11-6-2021 at 11:09

From Guidelines for posting on the ScienceMadness forum
Quote:
6. The use of references

Do not open new topics without providing all the necessary references for whatever you are describing or posing as a fact. Keep in mind that a topic without a single reference to the relevant primary literature, or to sources of your claims, is effectively worthless as it provides no starting point and no reading material for a constructive discussion. It is not expected, though it would be desirable, that you perform a complete literature review on the pertaining topic, but a minimum must be set. Have you ever seen a scientific article without references? Most likely no and for a good reason - an article without references is not a scientific article. SM is a science forum and it can only remain such as long as the members use references. The need for references generally correlates with the obscurity of the claim, but too much references is always better than too little. In any case, do not use phrases of the type “I have read...” or “I have heard...” without providing the source.

The choice of references format is not that important, but enough data must be provided to easily locate the articles or other sources. Wikipedia is not a reliable source and should not be your only reference. Nowadays, the easiest way to cite sources is to use the digital object identifier (DOI) codes when available. Alternatively, when possible, a static URL to the abstract can be provided together with the reference. You can provide references either in the text or as a numbered list at the end of the post.
Never forget to cite sources for citations and make sure to format the cited text in quotations. Failing to cite sources is considered plagiarism which is definitely not an acceptable behavior.


Do you have access to a librarian in an academic library? They may help answer your general questions about academic/scientific writing. Also academia.stackexchange.com is nice to browse.