I'm writing a practical report about size exclusion chromatography and I've been told to give a standard analytical techniques reference in a "materials and methods" part of my report.

Could anyone explain me please, how to reference such things and can I use an internet article for that? It's my first science report and I have no idea what I am doing.

Thank you for your help!

Hi vanklik,

 

I have not personally done any work in that particular field, but when I was writing papers for my own degree, I would sometimes have to add references for standard practices to my methods section.

 

What I did was to find a peer-reviewed article or two which discussed (usually in depth) how the technique itself had been shown to be effective, then reference that. I would usually write something like this in my Methods section:

 

"As shown by Smith and Hankel (2007), and supported by Matsukoku et. al (2008), size exclusion chromatography was accurate within an error of plus or minus 0.45 in 97% of all test cases. This success is two times higher than other techniques studied (Miller 2007)."

(note: this is completely made up, and I'm just using it to convey the concept... don't use these numbers or names )

 

 

Then, in the references section of your paper, you give the full citation to that article... something like this:

 

Smith, J., Hankel, T. 2007. Comparative accuracy of size exclusion approaches. J Physiol 62(6):1130-1142.

 

Matsukoku, F., Nanduc, B., Korrina, R, and T. Timm. 2008. Size exclusion chromatography as a effective measure of analysis: Confirmation and statistics. Nature Biology 33(6):113 -114.

 

Miller, S. 2007. Size exclusion in the lab. Applied Chemistry Journal 31(1):24-29.

 

 

Here's a helpful link for learning how to cite: http://cbe.wisc.edu/assets/docs/pdf/biolearn/TeachingTools/Radish/citing_literature.pdf

 

You can also search something like Google Scholar to find papers.

http://scholar.google.com/

 

 

Just use your key terms... like "size exclusion chromatography" to find a paper or two which meet your needs. Like this:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=size+exclusion+chromatography&num=10&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=any&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_sdt=1&as_subj=bio&as_subj=med&as_subj=chm&as_sdts=5&btnG=Search+Scholar&hl=en

 

 

I think you can do the rest. Good luck.

Thank you so much for your help. I think I will be able to manage now.

Have a happy Christmas day tomorrow!