The Library’s online Referencing Guide explains many of the principles of referencing, and helps you reference different types of resources, such as books, journals, webpages and images. This page is your gateway to that guide, but also gives you some help in referencing for biological sciences in particular.
One issue for Biological Science students is how to reference certain special resources such as informatics tools and datasets. You might be tempted to reference these as webpages – however they are reviews of academic work by hundreds of experts, and are publications in their own right, and so should be referenced in a special way.
There are examples of some of these resources at the bottom of this box.
So how do you cite these informatics tools? There are 3 steps to do this (you can follow these on a helpful tutorial here to make things really clear).
Examples of these informatics tools are
In the Referencing Guide there are instructions for what to do if you do find it necessary to quote from a text word for word. However:
You can find more help with scientific writing on our academic writing guide, which has a page specifically on the subject