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Biological Sciences: Referencing

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.

Link to BU Harvard Referencing Guide

Referencing Informatics Tools & Databases - Guidelines and Tutorial

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:

  • First, find guidance on the site for how to cite. Look for the information at the bottom of the page, or under Help or FAQs. If you can’t find it, you can try ‘how do I cite [database name]’ in Google, and that should bring up the right page – but be careful it is advice on the actual database and not someone else’s opinion.
  • Secondly, make sure you have the correct version of the data in your reference. This will change at least annually, so check you have the most up to date version.
  • Thirdly, you need to convert the reference into BU Harvard format – again the tutorial should help with ways to do this.

Examples of these informatics tools are

Referencing Examples

Once you have found out how to reference from the dataset website, remember that this must be formatted according to BU Harvard.

Example 1 from Ensembl (genome browser)

On their FAQs page, it suggests Ensembl is referenced according to their most recent review overview article.

Example in BU Harvard:

Cunningham, F., Allen, J. E., Allen, J., Alvarez-Jarreta, J., Amode, M R., Armean, Irina M., Austine-Orimoloye, O., Azov, Andrey G., Barnes, I., Bennett, R., Berry, A., Bhai, J., Bignell, A., Billis, K., Boddu, S., Brooks, L., Charkhchi, M., Cummins, C., Da Rin Fioretto, L., Davidson, C., Dodiya, K., Donaldson, S., El Houdaigui, B., El Naboulsi, T., Fatima, R., Giron, C. G., Genez, T., Martinez, Jose G., Guijarro-Clarke, C., Gymer, A., Hardy, M., Hollis, Z., Hourlier, T., Hunt, T., Juettemann, T., Kaikala, V., Kay, M., Lavidas, I., Le, T., Lemos, D., Marugán, J. C., Mohanan, S., Mushtaq, A., Naven, M., Ogeh, Denye N., Parker, A., Parton, A., Perry, M., Piližota, I., Prosovetskaia, I., Sakthivel, Manoj P., Salam, Ahamed Imran A., Schmitt, Bianca M., Schuilenburg, H., Sheppard, D., Pérez-Silva, José G., Stark, W., Steed, E., Sutinen, K., Sukumaran, R., Sumathipala, D., Suner, M.-M., Szpak, M., Thormann, A., Tricomi, F. F., Urbina-Gómez, D., Veidenberg, A., Walsh, Thomas A., Walts, B., Willhoft, N., Winterbottom, A., Wass, E., Chakiachvili, M., Flint, B., Frankish, A., Giorgetti, S., Haggerty, L., Hunt, Sarah E., Iisley, Garth R., Loveland, Jane E., Martin, Fergal J., Moore, B., Mudge, Jonathan M., Muffato, M., Perry, E., Ruffier, M., Tate, J., Thybert, D., Trevanion, Stephen J., Dyer, S., Harrison, Peter W., Howe, Kevin L., Yates, Andrew D., Zerbino, Daniel R. and Flicek, P., 2022. Ensembl 2022. Nucleic Acids Research, 50 (1), D988-D995.

Citation: (Cunningham et al. 2022)

Example 2 from UniProt (find your protein)

There is a Cite UniProt link at the bottom of the homepage, which suggests citing their latest publication.

Example in BU Harvard:

Wang, Y., Wang, Q., Huang, H., Huang, W., Chen, Y., McGarvey, P. B., Wu, C. H., Arighi, C. N. and on behalf of the UniProt, C., 2021. A crowdsourcing open platform for literature curation in UniProt. PLOS Biology, 19 (12), e3001464.

Citation: (Wang et al. 2021)

Example 3 from OMIM (online catalogue of human genes and genetic disorders)

In the FAQs section, you’ll find ‘1.8 - How should I cite IMIM?’  It recommends citing the actual journal article the data in OMIM is being taken from.  Each entry has links to journal articles and these should be referenced according to the BU Harvard template.

Using Quotations

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:

  • In scientific writing, quotations should be rarely used if at all.
  • Quoting does not demonstrate that you know your subject or have analysed an argument.
  • Your writing should express things in your own words, demonstrating that you have understood what you have read.

Science Writing

You can find more help with scientific writing on our academic writing guide, which has a page specifically on the subject