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Plagiarism, Referencing and Citation Guide
Plagiarism, Referencing and Citation Guide
In order to develop and support the arguments that you make in your written work, you will need to use the ideas of others. It is important that in doing so you reference the sources you have used.
These may include books, journals, websites, or online videos that you have taken quotes from or referred to in the text of your work. Referencing will make sure that you:
Do not commit plagiarism – this is the theft or non-acknowledgment of others’ intellectual work. This is a serious academic offense and can lead to your work being unmarked, or in the worst case failed!
Provide evidence to support the arguments you make. We need to use credible, timely, and appropriate information as primary or secondary sources of evidence to support our claims in an essay, coursework, or indeed exam. Teachers and examiners will reward you for the correct use of supporting evidence.
Allow others (such as teachers) to follow up on the references you have made for themselves.
Help a reader to understand how you have arrived at your particular conclusions.
Citation and Referencing
We recommend that you use the Harvard System of citation and referencing as this is the most common system in use. It also has the additional benefit of being easier to learn than the other systems of citation and referencing. It is a parenthetical referencing system, that is in-text citations are enclosed in brackets. Harvard is composed of two main components:
In-text citations including the author’s surname and the year of publication should be shown in brackets wherever another source has contributed to your work
A reference list or bibliography at the end of your work, outlining all of the information sources directly or indirectly cited in your work
In-text citations are references inserted into the main body of your essay or assignment. An in-text citation gives the author(s) and publication date of a source you are referring to. If the publication date is not given, the phrase 'no date' is used instead. If using direct quotations, you also need the source page number, if available. Direct quotations of less than 25 words are included in the main body of the text. For direct quotations of more than 25 lines indent the quote using the indent button on your keyboard.
For example;
This is a direct citation of fewer than 25 words;
During the 1980s disability organisations became more vocal in their calls for the amendment and enactment of legislation to extend enforceable access to civil rights for disabled people (Gooding, 1996).
And this is an indented direct quotation;
One of the fundamental reasons for the outbreak of war in 1939 was the burning sense of injustice felt in Germany at the savage reduction in the territory of the German Empire imposed by the peacemakers at Versailles.
In a clumsy rearrangement of the map of Europe by the main peacemakers, it is estimated that Germany lost 13% of its territory, something that came to be a source of bitter resentment to German nationalists in the 1920s. This, of course, was later “weaponised” by extreme nationalists such as Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party. (Woodbridge, 2018)
For indirect citations, where you are referring to or summarising the ideas of another author in the body of your text you need to add your in-text citation to the start or the end of the citation e.g.
(Gallagher, 2021, p2) Argues that fundamentally dyslexia is a deficit in short to long-term memory processing that prevents the text from being translated into speech or the internal voice.
It is argued that fundamentally dyslexia is a deficit in short to long term memory processing that prevents the text from being translated into speech or the internal voice (Gallagher, 2021, p2)
In your Bibliography or Reference List
In your bibliography or reference list, you need to add a full list of all the information resources that you have directly or indirectly cited in your work. You need to include not only the name and date but also other information, such as place of publication, publisher, and for online sources the date that you accessed the resource. This is an example of the full reference for the (Woodbridge, 2018) website that I used above.
Woodbridge, S., 2018. World War I: is it right to blame the Treaty of Versailles for the rise of Hitler?. [online] The Conversation. Available at: <https://theconversation.com/world-war-i-is-it-right-to-blame-the-treaty-of-versailles-for-the-rise-of-hitler-106373> [Accessed 2 December 2021].
As you can see the actual title is in italics, this is to differentiate it from the other text and make it clearer.
I am not going to list all the ways that you need to reference different sources of information according to the Harvard System because there are helpfully a number of online citation generators that will automate the process for you!
For example, https://www.citethisforme.com/
On another note, all of your references in the bibliography or reference list must be alphabetically arranged by author/editor, creator surname, or in the case of organisations such as the BBC that name/acronym alone.
Further help
If you require any further guidance on either plagiarism or citation and referencing please get in contact with the Library team and we will be happy to help. Email Library@wmsf.ac.uk or call in person or on Ex. 170.
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