If you’ve used someone else’s ideas or words in your writing, you need to say where you found them. Academic writers use a variety of referencing systems to do this in a formal way.
Why do this?
- It’s very rare that one writer’s views on a subject will be accepted with question, so you need to provide references to some sources to provide additional support to what you say.
- It allows you to show how widely you’ve read around the subject. You do get more marks for this (as long as you’re not forcing irrelevant references into your writing).
- Your readers can find the sources you use (and check you’ve used them correctly).
- You have to reference to avoid plagiarism.
- It’s polite to acknowledge the author’s contribution to the field.
There are many different referencing systems. They include Harvard, MHRA, Chicago, APA, MLA, Vancouver, IEEE … amongst many others. Check with your department handbook as to which is their preferred system.
Generally, however, there are two elements in each system: a list of references at the end of the document, and a citation inside the document which points the reader to the correct entry in the list of references. This can be a superscript number like this1 (Vancouver style) or the name of the author and year of publication, e.g. (Riihilahti, 2004), which is used in Harvard style.
The workshops starting on 9th October this year will have sessions on referencing and plagiarism. Our moodle module has details of the workshops, plus the handouts and further information on referencing.
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