How to cite and create your bibliography

Quote is to reproduce or mention the ideas and/or words of another author.

When you do an academic work you will often consult different information resources (books, journal articles, databases...).

If you use in your work a fragment or ideas which appear in the consulted information sources, you should cite its authors. Thus you put on record that the ideas are not original but they belong to other person's work.
 

The scientific document has to be documented and that we cite the sources used to:

• Recognize the work of other authors, and define responsibilities
• Reinforce one's argument with research and other theories
• Show that we know the state of the art of the issue, or more literature on the subject
• To locate the cited information sources and make it easy for the reader to obtain further information with the sources we have used
• Avoid plagiarism

A citation is the link between our text and the ideas, phrases or documents of another person. By extension, a citation is also a brief annotation that points to a bibliographic reference, usually listed at the end of the document in the form of a bibliography.

Therefore, a quotation allows to identify the information source from which you have obtained the cited ideas, text fragments, tables, images...

The bibliographic citations are presented in the form of a number, asterisk or note in parentheses in the text.

· All information that is not your own (text, photos, maps, charts, tables, datasets, etc.)
· Any specific information that is not common knowledge
· Any sentence written by another author
· Any idea of another person

There are many different citation styles: we will choose one citation style or another depending on our area of study and the target of our work.

For example, if the work is to be published in a particular scientific journal we must cite according to their guidelines, if it is for a class work you have to ask the teacher.

The following table describes the most used citation styles in the different areas of knowledge according to EndNote (we have added some area):
 

ESTILO DE CITA	ÁREA DE ESTUDIO	GUIA BÁSICA
ISO-690	Multidisciplinary
ACS	Chemistry
AIP	Physics, Astronomy
APA	Communication, Law, Psychology, Economics
APSA	Political Sciences
ASA	Sociology
Chicago	Economics, Humanities
Council of Science Editors (CSE)	Life Sciences, Veterinary
Harvard	Sciences, Economics
IEEE	Engineering
MLA	Language and Linguistics
NLM	Health Sciences, Veterinary
Vancouver	Health Sciences

There are several tools to manage the bibliography automatically. You can consult a comparative chart with the characteristics of the main bibliographic management software available to you: Mendeley, Zotero and EndNote Web

In the UAB, as well as in the rest of the Catalan public universities, we support Mendeley Institucional and Zotero. 

Plagiarism is the concealment of the sources used and pass through ours, ideas or fragments of text copied from other works. A violation of intellectual property is incurred. You will find more information in:

• Argumenta
• Guide "Com citar i com evitar el plagi" (Faculty of Politics and Sociology of the UAB) for students [in catalan]

• Bibliography in the catalog of the UAB and the CCUC (subject: bibliography methodology)
• Bones pràctiques en gestió de dades de recerca : citar les teves dades de recerca. By CSUC

  Tutorials and pages from other universities:

• How to cite. Website of the University of British Columbia
• Cómo elaborar citas y bibliografías. Biblioguía de la Universidad de Deusto
• Com citar i elaborar bibliografies. Biblioguia de la Universitat de Lleida