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COPHS Plagiarism & Citation Guide: Home
For students in the PA, Pharmacy, or other health-sciences field, this guide is an introduction to COPHS standards and best practices.
Butler University's official style guide for the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Many of the examples & explanations on this site come from the COPHS guide, so refer to this PDF for more information.
Recommendations of the World Association of Medical Editors on ethics policies for medical writing and publishing.
General Guidelines
References & General Rules:
Each reference should be cited in consecutive numerical order by means of superscript Arabic numerals in the order that they are used in the text.
Use caution when referencing the internet. Many web sites are not appropriate/credible sources. Use only the highest quality sites.
When listing author names, use the author’s surname followed by initials, without periods.
Be as specific as possible
Do not give a generic reference to Pubmed, Iowa, EBSCO, Science Direct, etc. Always provide the citation for the specific journal article.
When possible, reference a specific monograph within an on-line database (as opposed to the entire database), or a specific chapter within a book (as opposed to the entire book).
In-Text Citation
In general, references should be listed as superscripts at the end of sentences or phrases.
Citations should be placed outside periods or commas, but inside colons or semicolons.
Do not place spaces between punctuation and citations or between the citations themselves.
Capitalization Rules:
Journal articles, chapter titles in books, title of specific items in websites, video titles, etc.: Capitalize only the first letter of the first word in a title and subtitle. Exceptions: Proper nouns, abbreviations that are ordinarily capitalized (such as DNA), and (genus) names of organisms may also be capitalized in the title/subtitle.
All the main words of a Journal Name or Book Title are capitalized and italicized