Practice citation and reference vocabulary: 'as demonstrated by', 'according to', 'et al.', APA vs IEEE citation style, and integrating sources into technical writing.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
'_____ demonstrated by Vaswani et al. (2017), self-attention mechanisms can replace recurrence entirely.' Which phrase correctly introduces a cited finding?
'As demonstrated by [Author]' is a standard signal phrase for citing a specific paper's contribution. Other common signal phrases: 'As shown by', 'As reported by', 'As established by'. The choice of verb matters: 'demonstrated' (experimental evidence), 'proposed' (theoretical contribution), 'argued' (opinion-based claim).
2 / 5
'_____ Smith et al. (2022), the average inference time is 12 ms on a CPU.' When do you use 'according to' vs 'as shown by'?
'According to' is used for reporting a specific claim, figure, or assertion from a source. It is appropriate for statistics ('according to the report, latency is 12 ms') and is neutral — it does not imply you endorse or verify the claim. 'As shown by' implies the finding was visually or experimentally demonstrated. For citing a raw number from a paper, 'according to' is safer.
3 / 5
'LeCun _____ propose convolutional networks for image classification.' When is 'et al.' used in academic writing?
'Et al.' (Latin: et alii, 'and others') is used when a work has three or more authors — you name the first author and add 'et al.' rather than listing all names. Example: 'Devlin et al. (2019)' for a four-author BERT paper. Note: 'et al.' is always italicised in APA but not always in IEEE. Never write 'et. al' or 'et al' without the period.
4 / 5
In APA style, which in-text citation format is correct for a 2021 paper by Brown with multiple authors?
APA in-text citation format: (Author, Year) or (Author et al., Year) for 3+ authors. Parentheses are required; the year follows the author. IEEE uses numbered brackets [5] instead of author-date. APA is common in social science and psychology; IEEE is standard in electrical engineering and computer science conferences.
5 / 5
'The results align with those of prior studies [4][8][15].' This numbered citation style is characteristic of:
IEEE citation style uses sequential numbers in square brackets assigned in order of first appearance. Multiple citations are listed as [4][8][15] or [4, 8, 15]. The full references are numbered in the bibliography. APA uses (Author, Year), Chicago uses footnotes or author-date, MLA uses (Author page). IEEE is the dominant style in CS and engineering conference papers.