Referencing
Read the following information carefully and then complete the short quiz.
You will then have completed the course.
Referencing
Click to expand each of the headings below and read the information carefully:
-
What is referencing?
Referencing is the way of giving proper credit when you use other people’s words or ideas in your own writing. Many students find referencing tricky but learning how to do it properly is extremely important. Referencing your sources is an essential part of your academic work, and poor referencing can mean that you lose marks.
- Why is referencing so important?
At university, you will be expected to engage with the ideas and knowledge of scholars. Referencing the sources you have read allows your tutors to see the extent of your research.
The other important function of referencing is that it openly acknowledges the sources you have used in your work. Failing to show when you use other people’s words or ideas is a serious academic offence. It is known as plagiarism in universities, and is regarded as a form of theft.
- Types of referencing
Referencing involves two stages.
- First, within your writing you need to clearly mark when you have used someone else’s words or ideas – this is called a citation.
- The second part is a detailed list of all the works you have cited in the main body of your writing. This list appears at the end of your work and is called a bibliography.
It is important that someone reading your work can easily find the detailed information about your citations. To make this easy to do, two types of referencing are commonly employed – numbered and author/date.
Numbered Referencing
Numbered referencing involves adding a number every time you quote or use an idea you have found in your research. At the end of your writing, you give the full details beside the number corresponding to that given in the text.
For example, the authors of this work have referenced three studies, and so at the end of the sentence are three numbered citations:
If someone wanted to find out about these studies they can skip to the end of the paper and look for the relevant numbers:
Some numbered referencing styles don’t list all references at the end, but instead use footnotes so that a reader can simply look at the bottom of the page to see the details.
Author/date referencing
Author/date referencing gives the surname of the author and the date of the work in brackets within the text. In the example below the author has also given the exact page number where the quotation appears.
This is what it means:
McLaughlin is the author
1996 is the year the work being cited was published
56 is the relevant page number for the quotation
At the end of the text, all works cited are listed alphabetically by the author’s surname:
BACK
Module D Quiz 1
NEXT
Module D Quiz 2