Referencing

Introduction

When your writing any report or assignment it is important when you're using the words or ideas of another person you acknowledge their work. The way we do this is to use a referencing system. The most common used referencing system used by students and academics is the Harvard Referencing System.

Why referencing is important is for the following reasons:

Acknowledges the work of others.
Thereby avoiding plagiarism.
Enables others to find and use the sources that you cite.
Enables tutors to check the accuracy and validity of your evidence.
Supports your arguments.
Gives credibility to your conclusions.
Demonstrates the range of your reading/research.

This video below explains in more detail why referencing is important:

When To Reference

You would normal reference things when doing the following:

When you use somebody else's words or ideas from a book, journal, newspaper, song, TV program, movie, web page, computer program, letter, advertisement, or any other medium.
When you use information obtained through interviewing another person.
When you copy the exact words or a "unique phrase" from somewhere (quote).
When you reprint any diagrams, illustrations, charts, and pictures.
When you use ideas that others have given you in conversations or over email.

Example of things you can reference:

Online Encyclopedia Article
Audio Visual
Personal Communication (E-Mail)
Photos & Images
Books
Journals
Magazines
Websites
Youtube
Videos
Newspaper
Websites
Articles

In a Nutshell... Whenever you use words, images or ideas that are not your own.

When You Don't Need To Reference

When you believe that what you are writing about is widely known and accepted as fact; often referred to as ‘common knowledge’. When you can honestly say that you knew this fact or information before you started your course.

If in doubt, reference it!

Citations and Reference

A citation is in-text. It features author name(s) and publication year:

Jones (2016), or:
(Jones, 2016), or:
(Jones, 2016, pp 1 – 5)

A reference is an alphabetical list of all sources that have been cited, with more information. This can also be referred as a bibliography.

What does a citation and reference look like?

Bibliographies and Reference Lists

You will need to supply a bibliography or a reference list at the end of your assignment

A bibliography is a list of everything you have read for the assignment, even if you don’t use the information.
A reference list is a list that only contains resources you have used information from within the assignment.

Reference lists and bibliography enable your tutor to find the resources you have used for your assignment and also demonstrates how widely you have read around the subject