REFERENCES

 

Your lab report will owe a great deal to other sources. First, there is the text or lab manual from which you got your assignment, which will often give you some background information about the experiment as well as the materials and methods for carrying out the experiment or procedure. Then there is the basic text for your class, which will give you more extensive information about the theory related to your experiment. Occasionally you might need to go beyond these basic sources to additional books, papers, or web based resources. In any event, when you use information from a source you need to acknowledge that information in the appropriate way. Different disciplines have different conventions for ackowledging sources in their publications. The American Chemical Society (ACS) has a style guide that spells out the details of the conventions used for chemistry papers in this country. In general in your references section you list in the proper bibliographic format the sources that you referred to in your lab report in the order in which you cited them. These entries are numbered (1, 2, 3, etc.) in the references section. In the body of your lab report, whenever you use information from one of these sources you acknowledge it by placing the appropriate number in parentheses generally at the end of the sentence in which you cited the source. Here is an example of how this can be done from Dr. Korkmaz's lab report on her precipitaion titration procedure:

The Mohr method uses chromate ions as an indicator in the titration of chloride ions with a
silver nitrate standard solution. After all the chloride has been precipitated as white silver
chloride, the first excess of titrant results in the formation of a silver chromate precipitate,
which signals the end point (1).

When we look at the references section we see that the information about the Mohr method in this paragraph comes from "Fundamentals of Analytical Chemistry, 7th Edition," by Skoog and company.

Following are two links to sites that will give you more specific information about the conventions of the ACS style manual.

 ACS style guidelines from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

 More ACS Guidlines from Youngstown State University

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