Your Librarian
Sharon Clayton
She/Her/They
Contact:
Lauinger Library
For research consultations or reference questions, please email me.
For research consultations or reference questions, please email me.
202-687-7467
ACS Guide to Scholarly Communication
- The ACS Guide to Scholarly CommunicationAn excellent resource by the American Chemical Society which teaches about scientific communication, scientific journals, data, and citation styles as well as chemistry specific citation conventions.
Get Answers
Why Cite?
The primary reasons for citing sources when presenting research are:
- To give credit to the authors whose work you have drawn upon, and
- To allow readers to track down & consult your sources
There are many style guides for formatting citations and creating bibliographies. Chemistry usually follows the American Chemical Society Citation Style.
Some journals will have their own citation style or use another journal's. For example the Publication Nature has a citation style, and several other journals will say - Use Nature's style. If you need help with a citation style, follow the links below or email the librarian for Chemistry, Sharon Clayton.
Citation Formatting Help
- American Chemical Society Citation StyleACS Style is frequently used in the field of Chemistry. This Quick Guide helps you format citations according to this style.
- Purdue OWLPurdue's OWL (Online Writing Lab)is recommended as a guide to MLA, APA. It also provides advice on research, writing, document formatting, and avoiding plagiarism.
- How To Cite Data (MSU Library)A concise page with helpful tips on citing your data and examples from three official style guides (APA, MLA, and Chicago). Includes information about how to cite tables, datasets, and citing within text. From Michigan State University Libraries.
Citation Management Systems
These tools allow you to gather citations and PDFs in one place and then quickly create a bibliography. You have to start using them well before your paper is due, however.
- ZoteroZotero is a free tool designed to help you gather, manage and share information about books, articles, web pages and other digital objects that you are using in your research, and to generate citations and bibliographies. Zotero is a Mozilla browser plugin. You can choose to gather your data on your hard drive (if you are working mainly from one computer), or on a flash drive or a network (if you frequently access your data at multiple workstations).
- RefWorks This link opens in a new windowRefWorks is an online research management, writing, and collaboration tool designed to help researchers gather, manage, store, and share information and generate citations and bibliographies.
- Endnote via ClarivateEndNote is a Citation Manager, Subscribed for you by Georgetown. It is accessed through Clarivate's Web of Science. You must set up an account using your Georgetown email to use the service
