242 citations for project

Although our project write-up is comparatively informal, we nonetheless must cite our resources so that the interested reader can find them. There are many acceptable forms: honesty, clarity, and consistency are our priorities.

Duke University's library provides a very concise and easy-to-use collection of citation forms. Ours will be based on the Council of Science Editors stylebook, which you can find, along with other manuals of style, near the reference desk in our campus library.

I am using an article that was in the New York Times online, but not, as far as I can tell, in the printed version, and I got a PDF for the scholarly source online, too. I will cite my sources in this fashion:

0. Identification

[1] Parker-Pope, Tara. Boy or Girl? The Answer May Depend on Mom’s Eating Habits. The New York Times [Internet]. 2008 April 23 [cited 2008 April 24]. Available from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com.

[2] Mathews, F., Johnson, P. J., & Neil, A. You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans. Proceedings of The Royal Society B [Internet]. 2008 May 1 [cited 2008 April 24]. Available from http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/w260687441pp64w5/fulltext.html.

The elements of these citations are:

• author(s)
  
• article title
  
• journal title
  
• date of publication
  
• date of access, if this applies
  
• URL, if this applies

If I had actually used a printed version of my resource, I would replace date of access and URL with volume and page numbers. The URL of the Times article was actually one of those insanely long ones, and I abbreviated it. Do so only in case of insanity.

Then, when I quote or paraphrase from one of these references in my own paper, I will say, for example,

They say that one would expect that we humans would have evolved "facultative sex ratio variation" [2], but little evidence that we have done so has yet been discovered.

(Not necessarily a real sentence from my paper!)

The project is mostly based on one described in Teaching Statistics: a bag of tricks by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan, Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-19-857224-7, and I thank OUP for contributing the book. The collaborative group work that we do is based on the teaching of Mary Pierce Brosmer, founder of Women Writing for (a) Change, who has helped me personally with ideas and strategies.