Understanding Referencing Styles and Techniques in Academic Writing

Desklib provides past papers and solved assignments. This report explains referencing styles and techniques.

What is Referencing?
The academic writing is based on more than just ideas & it used to experience one
author. It generally uses the research and idea of different sources that are like
websites, journal articles, books and many more (Priya et al.,2017). This all used to
supports ideas of authors or may analyzing, discussing and critiquing other sources.
The referencing is done for telling the readers from where this idea has been taken in
the assignment. There are different reasons why referencing source correctly.
 It used to show how our argument is related to the big picture.
 It used to provide the credits to the originators of ideas, research and theories
findings.
 It is also used to show to the reader that from where ideas or from other been
used in.
The failure in the proper acknowledgment source used to call as plagiarism. The issue
of plagiaries can be solved with the help of referencing and by doing referencing we are
all to copy the words from the article, book and from other sources.
Citations and References
The two elements are used in the referencing:
1. Citation in the text of assignment and it is also called as in-text citations.
2. The references list is entered at end of the assignment.
A citation includes only a little information for the reader that is to find a source in the
reference list. This used to include the source that is author & year of the source was
getting published. For example (Lazar, 2006) it showing the author name as well as the
year. The Lazar is the name of the writer that was published in 2006. The below
provided is the reference for it.
Lazar, J. (2006). Web usability: A user-centered design approach. Boston, MA: Pearson Addison Wesley.
The references list is the list of sources (cited) in the assignment. It is arranged
according to the alphabet that is according to the name of authors. Every entry in the
reference list and it used to contains all the detailed information regarding the one
source. It involves the author's name and publication, source title and details of the
publication (Turabian, 2018).

Referencing Styles
Referencing is the formal system: There are some of the rules that need to follow some
standards rules and regulation while formatting references and citations. It required to
skill and patience to learn the referencing styles. There are different types of formatting
styles are used like Oxford style, MLA style, Chicago style, APA style, and Harvard
style. These all styles are different in some ways and they are asked by different
colleges’ as well different departments (Priya et al.,2017). For example, the Oxford style
uses the footnotes that are instead of the in-text citations and for the bibliography that is
instead of the reference list.
Each style has their own rules like the author, date, styles (MLA, APA, & Harvard) they
use the author's name within the text of the assignment. The documentary, notes style
(that is Oxford & Chicago) that used to put the author’s name that is in the footnote that
is in the bottom of every page and in endnote of every assignment (Turabian, 2018).
They all are different in the format, for example, the APA in-text citation that
incorporates the author’s name, publication & sometimes it also shows the page
number & the separated by the commas. The below-provided table explains the
different referencing style with their in-text style:
Table 1: Table
Referencing Style name Example
APA in-text citation (Lazar, 2006, p.52)
MLA in-text citation (Lazar 52)
APA reference list entry Lazar, J. (2006). Web usability: A user-centered design
approach. Boston, MA: Pearson Addison Wesley.
MLA reference list entry Lazar, Jonathan. Web Usability: A User-Centered Design
Approach. Pearson Addison Wesley, 2006.
Referencing Software:
Massey Library has the information that used to runs workshops on the software that
used to manage the citations and the referencing automatically. Some of them are
explained below:
1. Microsoft world: It has the citations and the bibliography function.
2. Endnote reference management software: It is used to creates, manage and
stores the references.
3. Zotero: It helps to organize, share, collect and cite the research sources.

4. Cite This for Me: This is used to generates citations and the bibliography into the
various styles.
5. Mendeley: It is used to managing reference and academic social media.

References
 Loizides, F. and Schmidt, B., 2016, May. Referencing of complex software
environments as representations of research data. In Positioning and Power in
Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas: Proceedings of the 20th
International Conference on Electronic Publishing (p. 58). IOS Press.
 Priya, S.R., Swetha, P., Srigayathri, D., Sumedha, N. and Priyatharishini, M.,
2017, August. Hardware malicious circuit identification using self referencing
approach. In Microelectronic Devices, Circuits and Systems (ICMDCS), 2017
International conference on (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
 Turabian, K.L., 2018. A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and
dissertations: Chicago style for students and researchers. University of Chicago
Press.