<p>I am currently writing a scientific paper on research I've been doing for the last year and a half. I have written some in the past, but I eventually hope to enter this one in a major competition. I have a question about how to write up the methodolgies section. Do there need to be citations and references for the different techniques or procedures you use if they are based off others? For example, there are several techniques I have used in the lab that my mentor showed me and that are very specific to the needs of my experiment. Obviously, they were developed by somone other than me. They are not common knowledge in the sense that you can find them in basic textbooks, but they are fairly widely used in my field. Mostly this concerns types of lab equipment and their application to the field, as in most cases I have adapted the methods and use of the equipment to my own needs. Interestingly, I have seen these things methods both cited and not cited in published papers. I haven't cited really anything in the methodologies section in past papers, but now I'm worried that this could have been like plagiarism. So what is the basic rule for citing methodologies/techniques?</p>
<p>I'll speak from the perspective of a social scientist who has published a great many papers. If your methods are standard textbook or widely used, you can mention the method without needing detailed citations of others who may have used it. If you are using a new method, or one that has perhaps been used only by a few pioneers, or that has been criticized or questioned in the literature, then it helps to cite others who have used the method successfully. </p>
<p>This is part of the "sales" aspect of your research, not just a matter of honest citation: if there's a chance that your anonymous referees won't be familiar with the technique or might have doubts about it, it can help you to cite published work that has used it before. It's also reasonable, of course, to acknowledge the pioneers or developers of the particular method.</p>
<p>As a published scientist currently on the faculty of a med school, I'll comment that YES you should cite (reference) methods if they are developed by others or they will be attributed to you. Often, it allows the methods section of the paper to be shortened, e.g. "The concentration of porcelain in the subject's blood was determined using the methods of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. (12)" Then reference 12 in your bibliography/reference list.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input. I will try to reference where possible from now on. Is it bad/could it be seen as plagiarism if I haven't done so in the past? I always reference things in the intro like background stuff but I didn't know lab procedures need to be cited, especially if they are relatively well-known and used commonly.</p>
<p>¡ ! B U M P ¡ !</p>
<p>Plagiarism is the unauthorized appropriation of someone else's text or other written work (including graphs and charts, etc.) and representing it as if it were one's own. If you haven't done that, you haven't plagiarized.</p>
<p>The issue you are raising relates to proper attribution as to the originality of your work. Fundamentally, this is a matter that journal referees and editors deal with as part of the peer review process. They generally aren't interested in publishing work that doesn't make a new contribution to science. Nor are they interested in publishing something that is represented as the creation of the author but is really someone else's. I'm not speaking just of plagiarism in the previous two sentences. I'm speaking of whether the research results are original, and also whose results they are.</p>
<p>You have expressed concern about the methodological section of your papers. Unless a "process" that you used is proprietary or patented, you are entitled to replicate or reproduce the methods of other scientific research as closely as you wish to. Generally speaking, if a method or technique has been desribed in the published scientific literature, you can replicate it if you so choose. For reasons I mentioned in my previous message, it may be in your interest to cite previous researchers who have used the method or technique. And you certainly don't want to represent any method as your own original creation if what you are doing is essentially replicating the work of others. (Presumably, well qualified peer reviewers (referees) will notice any such possibly inappropriate claims.) But again, unless you've duplicated or substantially paraphrased text, diagrams, or other written materials that belong to others, it's not plagiarism.</p>