Citation - whats the right way to cite a paper? (Sep/08/2009 )

hello out there,

i´m currently writing my PhD thesis, asking me what´s the right way of citation.

can i cite the paper of which i´ve got a certain information from, or should i search for the ORIGINAL article where the information/experiment was FIRST described?

thanks in advance

You should cite the original article, where the work was first done- after all you want to give credit where it is due (that is, the people/person who actually did the work) rather than someone else who has since repeated/discussed it. Also, what if the paper you read misrepresented and/or misunderstood the original work, and is therefore not accurate??

leelee on Sep 7 2009, 11:46 PM said:

thanks for suggestion.

often it´s a pretty hard work to find out the "original" paper, because citations of different papers are also often not lead to the original paper, where something was FIRST investigated...

can i give multiple citations to one information/experiment??

moljul on Sep 8 2009, 09:58 AM said:

Sure you can.

And you do not always need to find the "original" paper that first noticed a certain thing.
Sometimes this is just impossible since the original paper is very old and often not avaible in a digital version or even hard to find in a paper copy.
But if you know the original is paper X , without even reading it, you can always refer to the authors of that paper.

As long as you always give the sources of where you got certain information its ok.

At least thats how I have been taught and told.

original paper if available.

Otherwise cite eg. "Smith et al. 1901 cited by Miller et al. 2005" so you can avoid that the mistakes leelee pointed out happen (I am sure you know the spinac/iron story....)

gebirgsziege on Sep 8 2009, 01:19 PM said:

Is this a general rule ? That you need to use the cited by.... ?

They have never really told me I should do this and thus when I read a certain thing in X I most of the times quote that I found it in X eventough X found it in another paper...

Afterall: when someone reads your paper, they can check the paper you used to quote...
And its been done a lot in papers... a lot of authors simply quote the paper where they found a certain thing eventough those papers found it somewhere else..


Maybe it depends on faculty etc?

However I must admit I am a fan of giving the original source, but this is not always possible

pito on Sep 8 2009, 05:06 AM said:

thanks pito for suggestions, i do my best to found out original papers (in case of reviews), even though it is very time consuming! but i wrote already 17 pages and already included lots of references until now, therefore i will not, in every case, try to find out original articles to one certain information! i´ll try to do the best in my knowledge!! hope that is enough

pito on Sep 8 2009, 02:06 PM said:

This would be the correct way (at least I was taught this). Otherwise you are giving someone else the account of finding out fact x. With the - more complicated - cited by you give the account of a fact x to the person who did the original research. But this is only used when the original literature is not available. And it can cause you troubles....maybe your reviewer is the one who found out fact x and you are not citing....and you might be suprised why your manuscript is rejected

But if you are refering to general facts of something (like eg the necrotroph lifestyle of Botrytis) you can cite a review article as well without refering to all original sources (sometimes indicated as "reviewed by xyz" to make clear that you did not use primary sources at this point.

I think it always depends on the type of facts you are citing....eg. you will not need the primary source for "Botrytis is a necrotrophic pathogen" but for you will need it when you discuss the behaviour of Botrytis in the presence of different fungicides.

gebirgsziege on Sep 8 2009, 07:21 AM said:

thank you, helped a lot

I have a related question, when writing the thesis how far do you have to go when citing methods that are in common use? I mean, someone first identified and optimised the protocol for SDS-PAGE/PCR/in vitro translation/transcription/use of GST tag in purification/co-immunoprecipitation assays etc etc etc!!! I assume we don't have to find the original papers for techniques like these???

P