Correct: 21st Century Cures Act, 2015. [online] Available at: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/6 [Accessed 3 Feb. 2017].

In-text citation: …(21st Century Cures Act, 2015)

Explanation: In the case above a student attempts to refer to a legislation document, but incorrectly assumes that this is just a web page. Legislation is a special type of references which has its own style. Who would think that we will deal with legislation documents in the School of Biology. It appears, however, that this particular reference is used by most students who write a standard essay about the use of stem cells, and the same mistake is observed in many essays.

A similar mistake refers to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act issued in UK in 2008. Most biological students since that time have been struggling to cite it properly. See below:

Wrong: Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. http://www.hfea.gov.uk/134.html. Last accessed: 01/01/17

Wrong: The National Archives: Department of Health (2012): http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/www.dh.gov.uk/ab/UKSCI/index.htm Last accessed 29th January 2017

Correct: Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. [online] Available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/22/contents. Last accessed: 01/01/17

Explanation: In this case the web page cited by the student contained a link to the legislative act which should have been followed. The original legislative act has to be cited, not one of the myriads of web pages describing it.

The examples above show that the primary reason for student citation mistakes is the misuse of Internet sources and suboptimal work of automated reference managers. In order to avoid these problems one can use the following simple algorithm:

1) Identify the type of the reference (book, journal, web page, legislation, etc);

2) Cite it using EndNote (free on our campus) or another reference manager software;

3) Manually check and fix mistakes (beware that usually there are mistakes);

4) If you do not know how to cite a specific reference type, look it up in the Internet and then go back to point (1).