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.

ACRL defined Scholarly Communication as "the system (i.e. formal and informal communication) through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use".

We provide these Research Support services:

• digital scholarship, the use of digital tools in academic research, teaching and learning
• making choices with regard to journal selection, publishing, open access, article processing charges (APC)
• use of research metrics and measuring of research impact
• sharing and depositing of datasets and scholarly outputs into ScholarBank@NUS

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.