Tagged with: 1984 • Article • Biology • Biology Class • class.....is • From • Report • scientific • site • Writing • Writing Class
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I am writing a “scientific report” for biology class…..is it ok to site an article from 1984?
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at
6:29 pm
7 Comments
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Yes, if it hasn’t been proven wrong.
Nitpicking: It’s “cite,” not “site.”
Good luck.
It depends. If it is about a topic with relatively few breakthroughs since then, it would probably be okay. If it is about nanotechnology, or the future of it, for example, then it definately wouldn’t be a source to trust.
It depends on your topic. If you are writing about science comparisons throughout history, then yes. Science, unlike mathematics is one of those topics that consistently changes. You want to site the most current information to be able to include the best info for your report.
sure as long as you can show relevance, show you understand the article you cite, and declare all sources.
check to see if the author of the article has posted anything related on your subject,
Provided that the article from 1984 is still true and has not been overcome by new discoveries, it is OK to reference the article as a part of your scientific report. If more recent developments have shed new light on the particular bit of information, however, you may either want to compare the two, or show as a contrast, or use the more recent data. Good luck!
Of course it is acceptable, provided that the work is still respected in the field that you are writing about. For example you may wish to give a report that has background on relatively old facts or procedures (like the determination of the structure of DNA, requiring 1953 citation for James D. Watson and Francis Crick). The trick is to just make sure that the material to be cited is still held to be true in the scholarly community (unless it is your intent to challenge it or otherwise explain why it is flawed). Additionally, if you need to check this out, this may be a good time to see if any more recent work has been done (often by the same authors). It never hurts to add more support your proposition. A good work generally can’t have too many well researched references, also you may cite more than one work as a source for a given concept you write about (sometimes even for single sentences).
Can you find the same information in a more recent article? That is over 20 years old now. If you can find a recent article with the same information, use that one.