Use and correct citation of figures and references in your BIOL2010 essay

Figures

Developmental Biology is an inherently visual subject - your essay can be made much clearer by the use of appropriate figures. You may design your own figures or copy them from text books or published papers. You may also modify existing figures by erasing labels for components that are not relevant to your point etc. You should, however, write your own legend to any figure not just copy out the legend from the original source and is the figure is either copied or adapted from another source you must cite that source in full in your figure legend. Add a sentence stating something like “Adapted from Levine M (2005) Left-right asymmetry in embryonic development: a comprehensive review. Mechanisms of Development 122:3-25,” or “Taken from Gilbert S (2006) Developmental Biology 8^th edition (Figure 10.42).

Peer reviewed papers and text books

Students typically draw from 5-10 different sources to write these essays. You may simply list the papers and text book chapters you have read in order to write the essay in a list at the end of it. Please give full citations, for papers this means author names and initials, year of publication, title, journal, volume and page numbers. Do not simply give URLs for the pdf version of the paper. For extra marks you may annotate your list by giving a one or two sentence summary of what the key papers or reviews were about.

Extra credit is also given for citing individual papers in the text. I would prefer that you do this by giving the first and second author’s names (use et al if there are more than two authors) and the year of publication in the style used by the Levine review. If the source you are using is not a primary research paper but a text book or a review paper you should use the form (reviewed in Raya & Belmonte (2006)). It’s OK to cite more than one source for a particular topic or point and for this essay don’t worry if you find yourself citing the same review several times.