Science:Science Writing Resources/Academic Integrity in STEM

Academic Integrity

One of the main activities of academics, researchers, students, and other members of the university research community is to build knowledge and contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations. One of the most important aspects of being part of a research community is practicing academic integrity. “Academic integrity” describes a commitment to the ethical production of knowledge, whether it be at UBC or another institution. This means being honest and transparent about how knowledge is produced, and respecting and acknowledging the work of others.

Doing your work with integrity includes:

Acknowledging the sources of your knowledge, especially through citation practices. Citing sources not only allows you to align your work with other scholars, but it also documents the scholarly conversation into which you are entering.
Adding your own contributions to an ongoing scholarly conversation. Part of producing knowledge is providing a sense of what knowledge has been produced before, and how you’re building on that knowledge.
Accurately reporting the results of your research. When collecting data (as in a lab), it’s important to represent the data fully and honestly (rather than representing the results we’d hope to find).
Completing assignments independently or acknowledging the contributions and input of others.

“Academic misconduct,” “academic dishonesty,” and “plagiarism” are all terms to describe actions that violate academic integrity. This includes but is not limited to:

Not acknowledging other people’s work
Taking credit for someone else’s work
Resubmitting your own work to another class
Falsifying data or results
Buying a paper or project to submit as your own work
Cheating on an exam

In many cases, students don’t deliberately commit academic misconduct. Rather, often they do so unintentionally because they don’t know how to meet the expectations of integrity (e.g., how and when to cite).

In writing-based assignments, plagiarism -- when the ideas and/or words of others are included without citation -- is a common form of academic misconduct. Here are some tips for practicing academic integrity and avoiding plagiarism:

Remember the purpose of research and citation. You are documenting what’s known about your topic so that you can add your voice to the conversation and extend that knowledge.
Make sure to give yourself enough time on assignments. Leaving things to the last minute may result in panic situations where plagiarism and cheating are tempting. And rushing through assignments might make it difficult to keep track of all your sources.
Document your sources as you go. Make sure to keep a list of all the material you’re engaging with and noting where you found it.
Familiarize yourself with the citation style(s) that are used in your courses and disciplines.
Acknowledge all sources (not just scholarly ones). This includes books, journal articles, websites (including Wikipedia), social media posts, email, images, figures, graphs, and lectures.
Make sure you know when to cite! You should always cite:
- Direct quotations
- Paraphrased content
- Factual information (with the exception of anything considered common knowledge). But be careful! What counts as common knowledge is audience- and discipline-specific and may even vary from course to course.
Ensure that you submit work that is new. In other words, don’t resubmit your own work from previous semesters or classes.
If in doubt about whether or not a citation is necessary, cite! It’s always better to over-cite than not cite.

For more information on Academic Integrity, check out these great UBC resources:

Chapman Learning Commons: https://learningcommons.ubc.ca/academic-integrity/
Enrol in the Canvas course, “Introduction to Academic Integrity”: https://writing.library.ubc.ca/writing-resources/academic-integrity/?

Finding sources

Scholars choose suitable sources for their research because these sources add relevant details and perspectives to their work. In any form of scholarly communication, the use of other reliable sources helps to signal the scholar’s credibility and knowledgeability about the topic, and locates them as a participant in a broader scholarly conversation that is happening through various published books, articles, and chapters, collectively called the scholarly “literature.”

Scholars work to build knowledge in their discipline, which requires that they engage with the work of others. Scholars rely on particular resources to help find and track what others are saying about a given topic in the scholarly literature. Learning what these are and how to use them is a valuable part of the research process. SCHOLARLY RESOURCES

The university gives researchers, professors and students alike, access through the library to many types of sources which you can use to develop your knowledge of a topic. To access a wide array of sources, and particularly scholarly sources, which are often behind paywall, the library is the best first stop (start online, but you may need to go in person to find printed sources that lack digital access).

There are several UBC resources that help you find the most relevant sources of scholarly work:

Use a Research Guide. Research guides help you find specific sources for disciplines that you may not be familiar with.

If you are a UBC student and/or have a Campus Wide Login (CWL), you can use the UBC Library Home page to find articles, eBooks, theses and much more!
Check out UBC’s Library Skills Tutorial for modules starting research, finding sources, and citing sources
If you are a student at another institution, visit your library and/or contact a librarian to find out how to make the most of the amazing resources available to you (on the shelves and online).

Google Scholar is sometimes recommended to researchers, but it can also cause problems, so be cautious. Google often aggregates drafts and pre-publication versions of works that have not been completely reviewed or met the high degree of rigour provided by peer reviewed scholarly texts. It also can misidentify scholarly sources. Yet, sometimes you can find helpful sources here that may not have appeared in the library search (and if you are logged at UBC or through the UBC VPN, you can click on the source and it will access it via the UBC library still). The key point is that when finding sources through Google Scholar, be sure to always double check that you have the final version and that it is a properly scholarly source (more details on that in the next module about sources). Don’t just trust the search engine because it has “scholar” in the name.

How can you keep track of all your references?

Develop a working bibliography for your research, where you track the citation information for your sources and add specific annotative notes about what they were about and how they were relevant (or not, if a particular source turned out to be unhelpful despite looking promising). This list will help you remember where you’ve been as you progress, and help you make sure to cite all of your sources as you aggregate information. Having a working bibliography document for your research project helps you avoid hours of searching back again to make sure you work with that source with academic integrity.

There are several programs that allow you to track your sources and add annotations, like a working bibliography app. UBC students and CWL holders can access Refworks for free while at UBC through the UBC Library website. Other free applications include Mendeley and Zotero, which you can use as well. All of these can also help you create your citations for you document, but they often include errors so know which style you are using and double-check them. See the library resource on citation management. Search Strategies

To maximize the effectiveness of using the above resources, you'll need to learn how best to use search tools, including what terms to search and how to use different search platforms. Scholarly writing requires you to find and use credible sources that reflect the ongoing scholarly discourse (e.g. citing a source from 30 years ago about the properties of DNA will not necessarily be a wise move, since knowledge about DNA has developed substantially since).

There are many resources out there, but inefficient searches can sometimes be overly time-consuming and overwhelming. To more efficiently search and find applicable sources, use the strategies in the video below. Keep practicing, and soon searching the scholarly conversation around a topic will seem less daunting and become more focused and even exciting!

Here is a video on helpful strategies to expand and narrow your search:

Identifying sources

Choosing suitable sources for any piece of scientific writing – especially a scholarly one, such as a lab report or essay – is extremely important. This is because these sources will help add relevant detail to your writing, provide more information for interested readers, and allow you to share evidence that supports the argument you are developing. The credibility of your writing will directly relate to the quality of the sources you cite, which is why it is so important that you are able to identify the different types before you cite them (primary, secondary and tertiary). Primary Sources

As a rule of thumb, you can think of primary sources as being ‘primary’ because the information in them is coming to you directly from the person/people responsible for it (i.e. it is ‘primary’ because nobody else has adapted the message intended by the original author(s)).

Because the information in primary sources comes straight from the person/people who created it, there is less concern about how another author might have interpreted or misinterpreted the source. Thus, employing primary sources in scholarly writing is generally encouraged.

That being said, how we think about primary sources varies by discipline.

In STEM disciplines, primary sources detail the results and interpretations of original research and experiments (and are typically written in IMRAD report structure).
In the Humanities, primary sources are original documents, texts, and materials that are used for analysis and evidence. These might include historical documents, poems, novels, film, newspaper articles, or other archival or multimedia materials. As such, in the Arts, many scholarly articles are in fact “secondary sources” (which we discuss next) that build from non-scholarly primary sources.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are peer-reviewed texts that build from primary sources, adding layers of synthesis, analysis, and interpretation. As such, they are a step removed from the primary source of evidence or information. How secondary sources function in the scholarly conversation again varies by discipline.

In STEM disciplines, secondary sources compile primary sources. For example, you could perform a literature search of all primary journal articles published in the past two years on the topic of ‘tropical fish evolution’ and then summarize the latest knowledge on this topic into one article. You would not have performed any of primary research, but have summarized it into a secondary source derived from it.
Such “review articles” are common in STEM journals, and are often a great way to see the latest developments around a specific topic. However, you must remember that the author(s) of these secondary sources have summarized the primary material (and therefore synthesized and interpreted it), which means that the authors ask readers to also trust their interpretations of the primary sources. For scholars, that can be a big ask.
Because secondary sources must cite all primary sources that they rely on (including providing a references list), readers have the chance to look back to the original sources to double check the interpretations and accuracy of the secondary source. Using secondary sources in your writing is perfectly OK – so long as you double check any significant claims against the original primary sources. It is your job as a scholar to be assured of the accuracy and credibility of your sources.
In the Humanities many articles are secondary sources because they work with non-expert primary sources. To reflect the scholarly conversation about a topic in such disciplines, therefore, requires authors to cite frequently from secondary sources. This is markedly different from STEM disciplines, which typically prioritize primary sources.

Tertiary Sources

Generally, tertiary sources are not relied on in scholarly communication, in part because they are often not peer-reviewed, but also because of their distance from the sites of inquiry and scholarly conversation.

Tertiary sources typically only report research/findings, and do not add to them, therefore they aren't typically used as a source in STEM research writing.
Tertiary sources are compiled from the primary and secondary literature, and are often written in slightly less scholarly terms to appeal to an interested but often non-specialist audience. For example, most encyclopedias and textbooks use information from primary and secondary sources but don’t generally provide references to these sources, making it difficult to check for accuracy or to consult these to add more specific detail to the points the tertiary source makes.
While tertiary sources, when published by academic publishers, are typically written by subject-matter experts, and can provide a very useful introduction for those new to a field, they are less credible as a source because they rely on the reader accepting the content without double-checking claims against the primary and secondary sources.
Generally, avoid using tertiary sources in your writing; rather, focus on primary and secondary sources, because they are where the more focused and reliable scholarly conversation happens.

It is also important to understand that although there are types of sources (such as journal articles, review articles, blogs etc.) that typically fall into the primary, secondary, tertiary classification system, it is not the format that makes them one of these types; it is purely the link between the author(s) and the material itself, whether the material has been peer-reviewed, and how specific the information in it is. Why Does This Matter?

Understanding the different ways knowledge is made and how it is shared can help us navigate the roles that a particular piece of scholarly writing takes as an addition to, or a summary of, the conversation. It also allows us to read, interpret, synthesize, and engage with this conversation from various vantage points and degrees of detail. Often, it is useful to start with a tertiary source from an expert voice we trust, to get a general sense of how the scholarly research has developed in the past, before jumping into primary and secondary sources that are more cutting edge and relevant to your own research.

As we’ve seen, different disciplines produce and engage with primary and secondary sources differently. In the Humanities, most of the scholarly discourse happens in and between secondary sources, and so your work should do the same. On the other hand, in STEM disciplines, scholars attend primarily to primary sources, with secondary sources providing added synthesis and review. In light of this, when looking for sources, you should first analyze how the disciplinary knowledge is being made and shared (and what task is required of you in response to it). Then, modulate your own research and writing accordingly in relation to these sources.

Video Resource

For a recap and for some extra information about identifying different types of sources for use in your writing, please watch Grammar Squirrel’s video on the UBC Science Writing YouTube channel. Included in this are two questions that can be applied to any source to help you decide whether it is a primary, secondary or tertiary source.

We then suggest you complete the quick quiz (below) to see whether you have mastered some of the important skills relating to identifying different types of sources.

Citing

Citation, or the practice of documenting the sources you use in your writing, is a core element of academic research and writing, regardless of discipline. Citing sources not only allows you to document the scholarly conversation into which you’re entering. This is part of producing knowledge; documenting what and who you’ve read in the course of writing your paper is a mark of effective scholarship that meets the expectations of academic integrity. Citation Formatting

Proper citation includes two parts: in-text citations and a complete reference list of sources from which these arose. In-text citations show the reader the specific information you have used in your paper and where exactly you draw on these sources in your discussion. The list of sources at the end of your paper gives the exact references you used, which allows anyone to easily find and refer back to them.

In STEM disciplines, there are different ways to format and organize citations, and these “style guides” are discipline-specific (and sometimes course-specific) (Hochberg, 2019, p. 14). Be sure to check with your instructor about which style they would prefer before you write your first lab report or paper.

Discipline/Subject	Association/Organization	Style Guide
Chemistry	American Chemical Society	ACS Citation Style Guide
Mathematics	American Mathematical Style	AMS Style Guide
Psychology and many other social science disciplines	American Psychological Association	APA Citation Style Guide
Some Engineering disciplines	American Society of Civil Engineers	ASCE Citation Style Guide
Various STEM disciplines	The University of Chicago Press	Chicago Manual of Style
Biology and other various STEM disciplines	Council of Science Editors	CSE Citation Name-Year Style Guide
Various engineering disciplines including: Civil Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers	IEEE Editorial Style Manual
Medical and Scientific journals; various Engineering disciplines	International Committee of Medical Journal Editors	Vancouver Style
Physics	American Institute of Physics	AIP Citation Style

When deciding which style of citing to use, make sure you follow any directions you were given. Once you choose a style, you must stick to it throughout your whole article. It is very important to be consistent with your formatting; it makes it easier for the reader to follow!

Check out UBC’s Library Tutorial on Citing Sources for a series of helpful videos! What and When to Cite

It can be difficult to know when and what to cite. You always need to cite:

Ideas, concepts, opinions of others
Direct quotes, summaries, and paraphrases
Facts used as evidence
Tables, graphs, or figures produced by anyone but yourself
Specific statistics or data

You may have heard that you don’t need to cite your source when the information you’re including is common knowledge. Generally, common knowledge can be understood as information that an average reader would accept without having to look up. This includes:

Information that most people know (such as that water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius),
Information shared by a cultural or national group (such as the names of Canadian prime ministers)
Knowledge shared by members of a field or discipline (such as that a double bond is stronger than a single bond)

However, it can be difficult to know what counts as common knowledge, because an “average reader” is audience and discipline specific. What might be common knowledge in one cultural group or academic discipline may not be common knowledge in another. Here are some ways to determine if something is common knowledge or not:

Ask: who is my audience and what can I assume they already know?
See if the information is cited or not in academic scholarship. If the information is cited in at least three different sources, it’s probably common knowledge
If you are not sure, assume the information is not common knowledge and cite. It’s always better to over-cite than under-cite.

Paraphrasing and Quoting

Paraphrasing means putting something that someone else has written into your own words, phrasing and sentence structure.

Because you’re presenting someone else’s ideas (even though you’re not saying it in exactly the same way), it’s important to acknowledge this with a citation.
Paraphrasing is useful because it shows that you have an understanding of the material and it allows you to keep your writing concise.

Quoting means reproducing the same words that someone else has written.

Not only does a quotation need an in-text citation with a page number, but it also needs to be presented in quotation marks.
Use quotations if a piece of information is well-phrased or unique and cannot be simply rephrased to have the same effect. For example, don’t write: Cliff et al. (1989) reported that “A total of 591 great white sharks Carcharodon carcharias were caught between 1974 and 1988 in the gill nets which are maintained along the Natal coast to protect bathers from shark attack” (p. 77). Instead, write something like: Nearly 600 great white sharks were caught in gill nets along the Natal coast between 1974 and 1988 (Cliff et al., 1989, p. 77).

Reporting Expressions

One way of making sure that you’re signalling to your reader when you’re including someone else’s work is to use something called a “reporting expression.” Reporting expressions signal that you are summarizing or reporting what someone else has written. Examples of reporting expressions include words such as writes, argues, finds, demonstrates, suggests, claims, explains, or shows.

Reporting expressions also allow you as a writer to take a position. For example, writing “Reilly (2010) shows that more than one cup of coffee slows response rates in people” is different than writing “Reilly (2010) suggests that more than one cup of coffee slows response rates in people.” Here, “shows” implies that you agree with Reilly, whereas “suggests” implies that you might have some uncertainty about Reilly’s research. It’s important to choose your reporting expressions carefully!

A helpful hint with citing: if you’re using a reporting expression, you still need to include an in-text citation. This is because you’re reporting what someone else has written, and you need to be sure to credit them for their work.

Further reading: