BCH 467: Analytical Biochemistry Library Lab

Now that you've learned how to find the full text of an article from it's citation, we'll switch this around and in this section you'll see how to take an article and compose a citation for it.  Why is it important to be able to do this? 

Whenever you write a lab report, a term paper, doctoral dissertation or journal article, you must identify the ideas and facts you obtained from other authors.  This is frequently called "citing your sources" and the reason you do it is to give attribution to the individual(s) who originally came up with the idea or gathered the facts.  How you cite your sources (the format or method used) is called the "citation style".    For this class, Dr. Lefler wants you to use the style required by the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC).  

In JBC style, you insert numbers at appropriate places in the text where the idea or fact you just described came from someone else. You'll use quotation marks around the text that is copied exactly from elsewhere.  Quotation marks are not used around paraphrased ideas or facts however you still must identify them as coming from someone else.  At the end of the text you will have a list of citations for the sources in which you found those ideas or facts and the citations will be listed in the same numerical order as you identified them in the text.  Each citation will provide the necessary information so that the reader can determine if they need to consult this other source, and if so,be able to find it.  

The majority of resources that you use for your lab reports are likely to be journal articles.  No matter which citation style you use, you must always remember to copy down (or put in a citation management program of your choice) the following 5 pieces of information for each journal article: 

• Author(s)
• Title of the article
• Title of the journal
• Year (or date) of publication
• Location data which is:
• the volume, issue, and pages, OR
• the digital object identifier (DOI)
  
  

The citation style tells you what order to put these pieces in and what the punctuation is used in between each of these pieces.   The video below will show you examples of JBC style for journal articles and books. 

Tools for Lab Reports: 

Continue the library lab by watching the video below.  You can also watch this video via this link: http://screenr.com/h2R8

When you finish watching the video, don't forget to do the exercise in the box below the video.   Note: parts and section numbers on this guide have changed since this video was made - ignore the instructions at the end of the video - the exercise is located directly below this video window. 

In this exercise, take the two articles you found in Exercise #1 and create a full JBC-style citation for each one.   HINT: the way the citations are listed below is not in JBC style.  

1. Taraska, J. W. Mapping membrane protein structure with fluorescence. Current Opinion in Structural Biology, 22, 507-513, 2012
    
2. Engelborghs, Yves  J Fluores 13(1): 9-16, 2003.

Move on to Section 3: Primary vs. Secondary Literature