Many resources in one sentence: how to use references?
So can I write like this: Example:
Exercising (Goodman, J. 2010), laughing (Wilson, A. 2009) and studying (Mann, 2000) have all health benefits that may have positive effect on your life expectancy.
So the point is to state that the activities mentioned before the references are all separately studied by the scientists but the outcome (=longer life expectancy) is valid for these all.
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In academic writing, this is appropriate.
You don't want to do an entire paper like this but, yeah, those individual references are important. If this was a news article you could say:
Goodman, Wilson, Mann and other researchers have found evidence that such disparate things as exercise, laughing, and even studying have health benefits that might increase life expectancy.
or
Many researchers have found evidence that such disparate things as exercise, laughing, and even studying have health benefits that might increase life expectancy.
Then talk more about each, or a least one or two.
But you're writing an academic paper. Whether it's for school or for publication, you need to reference the heck out of every claim you make. As awkward as it sounds, you don't want to be vague about who did which research.
I will slightly edit your statement though.
Exercising (Goodman, J. 2010), laughing (Wilson, A. 2009), and studying (Mann, 2000) each have health benefits that may increase life expectancy.
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I agree with Cyn's answer. All I'd add is if you're worried about such sentences' clunkiness you can do three things:
- Say what the list is about before presenting the list;
- If this is likely to be an issue in multiple sentences, or a serious issue in at least one, consider a reference-as-number format if your publication context permits it (though conventions may be such as to not);
- Make general improvements to the rest of the sentence, such as using further gerunds. (These "improvements" are not in the sense of grammatical "correctness" - everything you're likely to otherwise do would also be grammatically correct - but to make life easier for the reader.)
Assuming sources 1-3 are applicable, we'd get something like:
Documented sources of health benefits that may increase life expectancy include exercise [1], laughter [2] and studying [3].
I thought about using studies instead, but for whatever subjective reason I felt it wiser to allow myself a single gerund there. It may have been because "studies" could make it sound like I meant acts of scientific research.
Obviously, if the sources are footnoted we'd write a subscripted 1 instead of [1] etc.
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