Guidelines on Referencing Literature in Academic Writing
Added on 2019-09-19
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Guidelines on referencing literature in academic writingPlease read the following document very carefully. Students often come across problems when referencing literature in their coursework. Bad or inaccurate referencing affects the quality of presentation of the work at the very least, and at worst leads to accusations of plagiarism and possible failure of coursework.Referencing well is important for the following reasons:acknowledging the academic sources you have used to inform your argumentsdemonstrating wide and relevant readingdemonstrating how your thoughts contribute to the field and link to other research/ writingavoiding plagarism – inadvertent or otherwisecontributing to a high standard of presentation.These are all criteria on which academic writing is assessed.Remember also that your references need to tally with the books / articles etc quoted in the bibliography and that your references serve as a route for the reader to follow up your arguments. The following rules are therefore designed to make that as easy as possible.There are few basic and simple rules / principles to guide you in referencing in your text which are outlined below, with examples, all in a different font. (NB: the examples are not all real so do not quote them!!)1. When do I reference?When you are using ideas or information / data from the literature you must refer to the relevant authors. You need to do this EACH TIME you are using an idea from the literature you are reading.It does not matter whether you have referred to the author before, elsewhere in the text – each time the reference must be complete in line with the following guidelines. Otherwise you may be guilty, inadvertently, of appropriating someone else’s ideas, which counts as plagarism.2. Referring to a work without directly quoting from it.When you use an idea from an author, without using their own words, you need to acknowledge that author by citing the name and the date of publication. There are two ways of doing this.a)If the author’s name is integral to the sentence (ie serves some grammatical purpose) then add the author’s name and the date of publication in brackets.Eg :Bentall (2003) argues that teachers’ understandings of the training process need to be explored and built on during training.
orIn her research Bentall (2003) found that teachers’ existing understandings of the training process were a major influence on how they learned during training. In both the above examples if you took out the author’s name the sentence would not make sense, so the name serves a grammatical function in that sentence and therefore stays outside the brackets.b) If the author’s name is not integral to the sentence then place the author’s name and date of publication both within brackets. Place this information in the sentence after the idea you are referring to.For example:It is recognised that teachers’ understandings of the training process need to be explored (Bentall 2003).orIt is recognised that teachers’ understandings of the training process need to be explored (Bentall 2003) and their existing understandings of content acknowledged (Calderhead 1992).In these two examples you could take out the authors’ name and the sentence would make grammatical sense.NOTE : the author’s name and date come within the sentence. DO NOT place the brackets after the full stop as this will imply that the authors’ name and publication date refer to what is happening in the next sentence. It is not usual to start an English sentence with something in brackets that serves no grammatical function. 3. Paraphrasing When you are referring to an author without direct quotation be careful that your paraphrasing of their ideas is entirely in your own words. The aim is to sum up their idea so that you communicate the meaning of it. Taking their sentence and changing 3 or 4 words is NOT paraphrasing!!! This is easy to do inadvertently when one has read the passage a number of times, as it feels like the sentence is your own. Always go back to the source and check whether you are in fact making a direct quotation, even of just a few words, or part of a sentence, or a term that the author uses, or whether you really have paraphrased and only communicated the sense of what they are arguing. If you find you are actually quoting then follow the guidelines in section 4 below.4. Quoting an author directly – using their wordsIt is imperative that the use of an author’s own words is acknowledged by the use of quotation marks. This is the case whether you quote a particular concept that the author has ‘invented’, such
as Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of ‘habitus’, part of a sentence, a whole sentence, data they have presented or even a paragraph. Direct quotations must be in quotation marks and referred to by page number. Place the page number in the brackets next to the publication date:eg: Bentall (2003 : 16) or(Bentall2003 : 16) In order to decide whether the author’s name goes in or outside the brackets follow the grammaticalrule outlined above in section 2.Don’t put the page number at the end of the sentence separate from the publication date and author’s name as this means the reader has to keep moving backwards and forwards to get all the relevant information for following up a quotation. This can be very irritating to read.If the quotation comes later in the sentence than the mention of the author’s name this does not matter. Still put the date of publication and page number with the author’s name. Don’t quote the author’s name at the beginning of the sentence and then quote them again at the end. This is unnecessary and uses up more of your word count.Examples Correct:Bentall (2003 : 243) explores how teachers learn during training and concludes that teachers’ “existing understandings of the training process influence their understandings of both course content and reflective practice”. Note how in this example the words in the quotation dovetail into the words of the sentence, but it isclear where Bentall’s words begin and end.Incorrect:Bentall explores how teachers learn during training and concludes that teachers’ “existing understandings of the training process influence their understandings of both course content and reflective practice” (Bentall 2003 : 243).Note that you might need to quote only a phrase or word that an author has used, because this is a particular name they have given to something they have discovered. Even this needs referencing as a direct quotation.Example:
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