Title: Section 1.5: Documenting
Course: MSc level academic and professional (information) skills > Section: Part 1. Information skills, Plagiarism and Referencing

Introduction to documentation and processing

During your search you will have to keep track of what you have found and obtain the documents. Some of the documents might only be available due to the library providing subscriptions, others can possibly be found on the open internet.

When using the documents you should respect the copyright of others and make sure you refer correctly to the used literature. Preventing plagiarism is an important part of academic integrity.

Reference managers can help with managing your literature by keeping a structured database of all found references, as well as help with generating correct reference lists in your own papers.

Learning objectives

In this section you will learn about the responsibility to respect the copyright and intellectual property of others, and how to prevent plagiarism. Learning how to use the literature you found in your own writings, and how to compose correct references will be a step in the right direction.

After this section you will be able to:

- Recognize different occurrences of plagiarism
- Understand the importance of preventing plagiarism
- Recognize the difference between an exact quote and paraphrasing a text
- Recognize the references to different types of publications
- Write a correct reference list for your own report/paper
- Put correct references in the text to the literature used in such a way that it makes clear which statements the reference applies to.

Documenting your results

One part of using the results you found is to document these results. This is an often forgotten, but very important step in the process of searching for information. There are many advantages of keeping track of the results you found:

- you don't have to repeat a search because you forgot what the results were,
- you can retrace your steps and ask for specific advise,
- you can write down tips for your next search (new keywords, authors, limits etc.),
- you can easily narrow down your search based on the previous results, to the best information out of a database.

Documenting your search results is not very hard to do. Take a look at the example of a search log below.

Date | Source? (Database, book, internet) | Search terms and strategies (search profile inc. boolean operators) | How many hits (and how many were relevant) | Related term/authors | Notes
05/11/’18 | Google.com | Depression & drugs | 519262 (first 2 hits interesting) |  | Too broad, need to specify and search scientific literature
19/11 | Scopus (db) | (depressi* OR “mood disorders” OR sad OR melancholy OR unhappy) AND (drug* OR addiction OR “substance abuse”) | 213135 – sorted on relevance – some useful, but lot of noise | ‘substance misuse’, ‘dependence’, ‘affective disorders’ | Too many results. Search too broad perhaps. Also lot of old results!
19/11 | Scopus | (depressi* OR "mood disorder" OR "affective disorder") AND ((substance OR drug) AND misuse OR abuse OR addiction) >2009 | 11440 hits, and a lot higher proportion of relevant results | authors J. Sareen, C. Bianco, L. Sher wrote a lot | Selected key terms also result in articles about comorbidity, double-diagnosis, risk groups, predispositions… maybe focus more on psychology or medicine
20/11 | PsycINFO (EBSCO db) | depressi* OR "mood disorder" OR "affective disorder") AND ((substance OR drug) AND misuse OR abuse OR addiction) >2009 and 'systematic review' | 212 hits, ca. 50 seem very useful |  | I can also consider changing my search method by using the Thesaurus functionality to search more specifically…

What is plagiarism?

When editing information you do not only evaluate the quality and usefulness, but you also process the found information.
This can be done in multiple ways. Keep the rules about plagiarism, copyright and citations (references) well in mind.

Exercise: click here
Exercise 2: click here

Writing correct references

References in the text:

When quoting, citing or paraphrasing work of others, you must put a reference in the text:

For example, Jansen (1983) wrote...........

Exact quotations:

When using a literal quotation, the section in question is placed between quotation marks (“”) and/or is indented, often in a font different to the main body of the text. The page number must be included in the reference:

Jansen (1983, p.43) wrote “...............”.

NB. For long quotations you should ask the copyright owner’s permission. The formatting of in-text references also depends on the chosen reference style.

List of references:

At the end of your paper you should offer a complete and correctly formatted reference list.
Make sure you refer to ALL sources used in the text, but nothing more.

There are different styles you can use for formatting. In social sciences the APA style is often used. This style has very strict rules. In the (technical) sciences the rules are often less strict and every journal/publisher tends to use their own style. Just keep in mind to be consistent within the chosen style.

You can use a so-called reference manager, such as Endnote, Mendeley or Zotero (see also the next section for more info) to generate your reference list.

Examples:

Below you will find references for different types of documents in either APA style or the numbered style often used in the technical sciences.

For elaborate information about the APA-Style, take a look at the APA style blog or Wikipedia APA page.

Book

In the case of a book, the reference should contain:

- author(s)
- year of publication
- title in italics
- series, edition, translator and the like
- publisher, place of publication

APA-style:
Banyard, P. , Dillon, G., Norman, C., & Winder, B. (2015). Essential psychology (2nd Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Numbered Style:
[1] B. Mills, Theoretical Introduction to prgramming, 2nd ed. London: Springer, 2006.

Conference paper/Bookchapter

In these references often the “in”-reference is used. Moreover, for the sake of clarity, the title of the composite work (the whole book or proceedings) is in italics. In the case of a contribution or paper in a composite work, the reference should contain:

- author(s) of the contribution/paper
- year of publication
- title of the contribution/paper
- In: editor, title of the composite work in italics
- series, edition,
- pagenumbers
- publisher, place of publication

APA-style:
McNeil, D. W., Vargovich, A. M., Ries, B. J., & Turk, C. L. (2012). Anxiety and Fear. In V. S. Ramachandran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Second Edition) (pp. 161-168). San Diego: Academic Press.

Numbered Style:
[1] W. Jiaqi, K. C. Aw, and R. Sharma, "Optimization of valveless micropump for drug delivery," in Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems (NEMS), 2014 9th IEEE International Conference on, 2014, pp. 86-88. DOI: 10.1109/NEMS.2014.6908765

Journal Article

In the case of a journal article, the reference should contain:

- author(s)
- year of publication
- title of the article
- title of the journal in italics
- volume number, issue number, page numbers.
- DOI if available

In these title descriptions, for the sake of clarity, the title of the journal is also in italics.

APA-style:
Speier, C. et al. (1999). Faculty Perceptions of Electronic Journals as Scholarly Communication: A Question of Prestige and Legitimacy. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50 (6), 537-543. DOI 8.0013/JASIS.1999.06.015

Numbered Style:
[1] S. Kubínová and J. Šlégr, "ChemDuino: Adapting Arduino for Low-Cost Chemical Measurements in Lecture and Laboratory," Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 92, pp. 1751-1753, 2015. DOI: 10.1021/ed5008102

Electronic Documents

References of electronic documents have basically the same regulations as for printed documents. However, in order to become usable references, some information is added at the end of the description, such as

- the statement ‘published on CD ROM’
- www-address followed by the date of entry
- the organization that is responsible for the Web site
- DOI

When it is known that an electronic document is also published in print, then, if possible, also mention the necessary data to retrieve it in that form.

Exercise: click here
Exercise 2: click here

The end of section Documenting and processing

Here ends the section Documenting and processing.

In this section you learned how to correctly document and process the information you found in your own work. By doing what you've learned in this section, you can prevent plagiarism and give credit where it is due.

Please be aware that:

- every report/paper you turn in should be free of plagiarism,
- you should cite correctly and offer a correct reference list,
- all papers will be checked using plagiarism software.

Documenting and processing the information you found is the last step in the cycle of systematic searching. After this step you can choose to go back to one of the other steps in the search cycle, to do another literature search or to move on with your research.