The scientific references serve to provide and acknowledge the sources of information you have been using during your work. The references also document that you are aware of the context into which your work fits and that you have performed a proper research of the related work. This will support your credibility.
Students with limited experience in scientific writing often find it difficult to add references to their work. Part of the reason is that it requires training to determine when to use references. A good rule of thumb is that every time you read a text, search on the internet or discuss with others to find ideas or the solution of a problem, you should consider whether to add a reference or not.
More importantly it is also because it is part of the academic learning to discover the importance of a thorough study and analysis of the background, context and related work before moving on to proposing and implementing own solutions. It is very important to acknowledge that science moves forward only by building upon the work of others. If everybody reinvented the same things we would still be living in caves…
In general you should add references to all information, ideas, alternate views, data, algorithms, source code, data sheets etc. that you have obtained from other sources during your work. Be careful when selecting your references. It is important that you use good sources and that you don't hide any source of information.
There are many different formats for referencing scientific papers, but don't be too concerned about this. Whatever format you choose make sure that you use the same format throughout your paper. Here is an example:
Here are some relevant sources for accessing scientific work:
Internet references have caused many a debate among scientists the past years. While some thinks that carefully selected internet references can add to the value of your work, others believe they should definitely be avoided.
Before using internet references in assignments and project work it is therefore a good idea discuss this with your supervisor to get his or her opinion. In the end he or she will probably have to evaluate your work anyway, and if an examiner later questions your approach you can refer to the discussion with your supervisor.
The main problems about referencing internet websites are the varying quality of information and that the content is not guaranteed to be permanently archived. You must therefore consider these questions before referring to a website:
You should also consider if you want to add internet references among your other references or if you want to list them on a separate page or in footnotes.
When you make references to websites you should make sure to add information when you visited the webpage last. If at all possible you should make the web reference clickable within your document.
Example reference:
You can obviously do this manually, but it is a tedious work. There are several reference manager applications available, both cloud based and offline apps.
One example is Mendeley https://www.mendeley.com/features/reference-manager/ which is used by many. It may be a good solution, if you are working in groups.
I am using JabRef http://www.jabref.org There are probably much better applications out there, but it works for me and it is open source and cross platform. Another advantage is that the database of JabRef is a bibtex file which is the exact file you need if you are writing your report using LaTeX.
Whenever you want to add new references to your reference manager try not to key in the information yourself. Instead look at the location where you found the paper. Is there an option to export citations at the website? If so use that to export into a format which may be imported by your reference manager of choice.
Make sure that your list of references contain all the citations within your text.
Do not add any references that is not cited within your text.
If you want to acknowledge say a person or a company for supporting your work in general without being able to refer to direct contributions or if the contributions are not directly related to your work, you may want to include them in your “Acknowledgements” section instead.