Engineering: Research & Citations

Why Cite?

• To provide evidence for your arguments and adds credibility to your work. It shows that you have sought out and considered a variety of viewpoints on a given topic.
• To help readers find your sources. It allows them to go through some of the steps you took to reach your conclusions.
• To show your supervisor(s) the work that you have done.
• To avoid plagiarism.

What kind of sources should you cite?

• Direct quotations from a book, article, film, letter, email, lecture, etc.
• Ideas you draw from a source but present entirely in your own words.
• Paraphrases and summaries of books, journal articles, pamphlets.
• Single words, short phrases, sentences and longer passages quoted from books or articles used.
• Statistics.

Below are useful presentations and handouts on Research Impact Measurement. For further details, please refer to Research Impact Measurement guide.

• How to use Web of Science to find times cited and h-index of researchers
• How to use Scopus to find times cited and h-index of researchers
• How to use Web of Science to find number of papers published, times cited etc by a institution or a department 

Find out the citation style that your department or lecturer prefers. Once you have determined the style to follow, use it consistently in your paper, bibliography or reference list.

For resources on popular citation styles, click on the styles listed below  :

• ACS (American Chemical Society)
• AMA (American Medical Association)
• APA (American Psychological Association)
• ASA (American Sociological Association)
• Chicago/Turabian  
• Harvard
• IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
• Legal Style
• MLA (Modern Language Association)

Zotero is a free bibliographic citation management software that allows you to save, collect, manage, cite, and share research sources.

Zotero is available either as a Firefox extension or as standalone software that works with Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers. It works right in your browser, making it easy to save you citations while you search. Use the Zotero word processor plugins to easily cite your sources and create a bibliography while you work. For further details, please refer to Zotero guide.

EndNote is a bibliographic management software that:

• Stores and organizes citations found from many sources
• Inserts these citations into a Word document
• Automatically formats your references according to a predefined citation style

EndNote software is available to NUS staff and students free of charge for both Windows and Mac users. For further details, please refer to EndNote guide.

Mendeley is a bibliographic management software that:

• Collects and organizes citations found from many sources
• Inserts these citations into documents & format bibliographies
• Lets you drag & drop PDFs into your library & extracts the metadata to create a library
• Allows you to highlight and annotate your PDFs and share with others

NUS Libraries now has a subscription to Mendeley Institutional Edition (MIE). MIE offers more storage space and more opportunities to collaborate with other researchers. To find out more about MIE or how to join MIE as a NUS staff and student, please refer to Mendeley guide.