Your verbal citation practices: A silly poll
September 7, 2010
Do you have a particular style by which you cite literature in your common scientific parlance?
This poll was motivated by a comment from a trainee who observed that one style was common in the prior training stop and a distinctly different style was common in the current training stop. I found that odd.
DrugMonkey 
September 8, 2010 at 12:06 am
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September 8, 2010 at 3:21 am
I have a draft post about this. I find it’s really different in my new lab compared to my old one, largely because my new lab is in a field that uses anchoring authors (PI last) whereas my old field doesn’t really do that (authors in order of contribution from first to last).
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September 8, 2010 at 4:05 am
I always cite by first author, its how I remember stuff. It used to drive my masters supervisor nuts because he only knew papers by the last author so it always took a couple extra moments to know which paper each other was referred to.
My current supervisor seems to know both first author and group. I tend to still go with first author, but also know that groups of all the papers relevant to my field….I guess I’m growing.
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September 8, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Often we say the paper by xx from yy’s lab where they did the zz thingy. If xx is someone new or that hasn’t published in yy’s lab before, I usually just mention yy’s lab, since I’ve never met xx and it’s hard to remember people that you’ve never met.
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September 8, 2010 at 1:23 pm
I’m firmly in the “Yeah, you know what paper I’m talking about … the one where they did something or other and got that cool result? Yeah, THAT one!” group.
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September 8, 2010 at 3:04 pm
In considering my own habits, I think I predominate with First Author, Date but I have random intrusions of Last Author, Date. I do notice that when speaking to trainees I tend to use First Author (from Last Author’s group) a bit more.
I recall one of the most intimidating things in first year grad school was the facility profs had for remembering names and pub dates. It is only from this distant perspective that I fully appreciate how selective most of that was- they were just really familiar with their own subdomains of -ology.
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September 8, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Having you all describe your *verbal* citation practices reminds me:
When I started working in an RNA lab during undergrad, one of the graduate students used the word “putative” in conversation.
Everyone around him was taken aback, saying in effect “Wow, I’ve seen that word in papers, and I know what it means, but I didn’t think I’d ever hear anyone actually pronounce it outside of giving a formal lecture.”
The PI wasn’t there at that moment, but I imagined that he’d probably tease the graduate student for his high-falutin language.
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