Cite literature

Correct citations ensure that your reader can easily locate relevant literature that you used in your thesis.

Master and doctoral thesis should discuss their topic in relation to state of the art research by including citations to a sufficient number of related journal articles and recent conference papers (in addition to Web resources and books).

General Information (§1)

All cited literature should be included into the bibliography. If you use the LaTeX thesis template on the main page together with \cite and \bibliography commands, LaTeX will correctly format your bibliography.

If you do not use LaTeX please have a look at the following example paper and format your citations to match its style.

• Liu, Wei, Weichselbraun, Albert, Scharl, Arno and Chang, Elizabeth: Semi-automatic Ontology Extension Using Spreading Activation.

Citation Style (§2)

• If you use numbers to cite literature, always include the author’s name, if the name is required to properly read the sentence (2.1).

 WRONG:   [1] introduce an ontology extension literature.
 CORRECT: Wei et al. [1] introduce an ontology extension literature.
 CORRECT: The use of spreading activation is very popular in this area [2,3].

• Web sites should be referenced using footnotes, or citations (if the particular site is really important). If you cite a lot of Web sites please include them in an own section in the bibliography (2.2).

 A Bibliography
 A.1 Literature
 A.2 Web sites

• Citations of whole paragraphs are not permitted in the thesis (2.3).

 WRONG: Sentence A. Sentence B. [1]

Figures (§3)

• Provide a citation/source for figure taken from a third party source.

Bibliography (§4)

Please keep in mind that a bibliography helps locating literature cited in a paper or thesis.

• Take care that all entries are complete and contain at least the following information (BibTeX will warn you if any of this information is missing)
  • Article: author, title, journal name, number, issue, pages, year
  • Proceedings: author, title, conference name, location/address, pages, year, month
  • Book: author, title, year, publisher
  • Incollection: author, title, year, booktitle, editor, pages
  • Web page: author, title, year, url, last_access
• Do not abbreviate journal names in the biography (Comp. Stand. Int. -> Computer Standard Interfaces).