- Borrow & Request
- Collections
- Help
- Meet & Study Here
- Tech & Print
- About
Identify the main concepts within your topic.
Finding useful sources is highly dependent upon the words you choose to use in your searching.
Citation styles vary widely by journal. Check the journal's website to see if they provide citation instructions under a section typically called "instructions for authors." If you can't find this information on the website, use the references section of the journal article you want to model your references after as an example. Pay particular attention to the order they place the information in, whether or not they use italics or bold, how they abbreviate journal titles, and how they use punctuation.
For some examples of some common citation styles preferred in the sciences see the CSE style guide or the APA style guide.
The following websites give some tips on how to read scientific journal articles:
My brief advice for reading journal articles is to keep a pen handy to write notes to yourself in the margins, and always write a summary of what you learned from the paper at the top of the paper or on a post-it note immediately after you finish reading the paper.
The Writing Center - at OSU
Library Research Tutorial
Research and Documentation Online
Scientific style and format : the CSE manual for authors, editors, and publishers 7th ed
Valley T11 .S386 2006
OWL Help for ESL Instructors and Students - Resources for both ESL instructors and students
If you are not sure that an article you would like to use as a reference for your project is from a peer-reviewed journal, you can
121 The Valley Library
Corvallis OR 97331–4501
Phone: 541-737-3331