🐈 Thomas Chatting
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quick and dirty referencing 🖊

One lesson all uni students should have in their schedules every year is a lecture from the librarian of their school. In my case that was a recently graduated Humanities student (because who else would be the Sciences librarian?) who would give us the same talk every year on the importance of referencing.

Though boring as hell, I didn’t realise how lucky I was to receive something like this so consistently during my years at uni; it was only after I discovered my sister was never taught to reference.

turn it in and you (and the devil, too!)

All universities in this day and age use some sort of plagiarism ‘detecting’ tool such as turnitin to sort the cheats from the heroes. Most of these are terrible, terrible pieces of pseudo-ware which simply plug your work through Google et al to try and work out if you just copy-pasted Wikipedia.

To combat this, the primary school child in you will automatically begin rewriting what you are copying into your own words, but this is where the basic rule of academic writing steps in:

if you write anything which cannot be considered your own thought or idea, it must be referenced (Chatting, 2016)

building references

Wherever possible, you should compile a list of the sources you use for each page of your writing (just stick it in the footer) so you can go back once it’s finished so you can build your bibliography (which I’ll touch on later).

For books, grab the:

  • author’s name(s)
  • year of publication
  • book title
  • edition (if not the 1st)
  • city of publication
  • publisher

For journal articles, you’ll need the:

  • author’s name(s)
  • year the journal was published
  • title of the article
  • title of the journal
  • the page number or range of pages of the article
  • volume and issue numbers where you can provide them

For ‘electronic resources’, try to get the above plus the:

  • date you accessed the sources
  • the URL or email
  • type of resource (email, forum, website, etc)

quotes vs interpretation

If you ever use the idea of another person or quote someone (which you should keep to a bare minimum) you should be looking to add a reference. You can get away with not using a reference only when the information can be considered public domain, for example stating that the 6’o’clock News generally airs at 6pm.

direct quotes

If you ever copy what an author says word-for-word, use inverted commas or double inverted commas to wrap the phrase and follow it immediately with your reference. Do not modify the sentence in anyway, leaving mistakes as they are. You can correct any errors and show your reader you recognise them by using (sic).

referencing interpretation

This is how you should be completing the majority of your academic writing, as it is a true display of your understanding of a topic. You must still reference the ideas, and this is done by quoting the author’s surname and the year of publication in brackets.

referencing (the actual way to do it)

Harvard referencing can be broken down into two parts: the article’s body, and the reference list.

The article body points at the reference list using the author’s surname and date, which is then displayed in full with the source used in the reference list, for example if I were to say: referencing is a fking ballache.

Chatting (2016) suggests referencing is a tedious process.

Summarises the gist of what I said, whereas a direct quote:

Chatting (2016) stated ‘referencing is a fking(sic) ballache’

Referencing a journal or book might look like this:

F. D. Martinez, 2007. “Genes, environments, development and asthma: a reappraisal” doi: 10.1183/​09031936.00087906ERJ January 1, 2007 vol. 29 1 179-184

While referencing this website may look like this:

Chatting, T (2016) ‘quick and dirty referencing’, tom [Online], Available: http://tomchatting.github.io/article/2016/02/23/quick-and-dirty-referencing.html [23 Feb 2016]

Your reference list should be organised in alphabetical order (by author’s surname) or in logical order (the order in which you referenced them in the body).

let your references run free

The tl;dr of all this is please reference or you will fail/have an academic integrity review and that will be a bad thing. There is no ‘good’ number of references to aim for, but there is no such thing as too many references.

Layout and some examples taken from the University of Exeter’s Study Skills guide to referencing found here.

A fantastic tool for creating reference guides/bibliographies is Neil’s Toolbox, to which I would like to credit my entire degree.