General rules for citing sources in scientific writing

When to cite:
All ideas and facts that are obtained from other sources must be properly cited, unless they qualify as common knowledge. (If in doubt about whether something is common knowledge, provide a citation).

How to cite:
If the author’s name is used as part of the sentence, the citation should be in the form "Holsinger (1995) argues that X" If the author’s name is not used in the sentence, then the citation should be in the form "(Holsinger, 1995; Jockusch and Simon, 1997; Caira et al., 1998)". If there are one or two authors, list their names in the citation. If there are more than two authors, list the first author followed by et al. rather than listing all of the authors in citations. In the literature cited section, all authors must be listed. Refer to the example by Dr. Schwenk above for general guidelines.

Where to cite:
The citation should be placed at the end of the sentence if it applies to the entire sentence (before the punctuation) or immediately following the information it applies to. If several sentences in a row contain information from the same source, the source may be cited at the end of the last sentence.