Written Communication Toolkit

Referencing

"Referencing is the familiar scholarly practice of referring to the works of other writers, where they have supplied you with source material or particular arguments or ideas. This may not be necessary when the same ideas are written about by many authors in the field, but when you are expressing an idea or argument in the words of a particular author you must acknowledge him/her as your source. Failure to do so is a form of plagiarism (passing off someone else's work as your own) and it incurs heavy penalties."

Peters, P. (1985). Strategies for Student Writers.: A Guide to Writing Essays, Tutorial Papers, Exam Papers and Reports . Brisbane: John Wiley & Sons, p. 123.

Source material is documented for three main reasons:

• To give credit to the original author;
• To indicate the writer's own research credibility; and
• To enable others to locate the original work, or actual words.

Conventions for referencing vary between disciplines, journals and publishing houses. The social sciences, for example, uses the American Psychological Association (APA), or Harvard conventions; while medicine, health science and the sciences use the Vancouver system; and the humanities uses the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) system. Examples of these systems can be found as follows:

Citing and Referencing: How to Acknowledge your Sources.

Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/tutorials/citing

Referencing:

Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://www.allenandunwin.com/estudy/referencing.asp

Library On-Line Tutorials: How to Acknowledge What You've Read:

Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/vl/cite/citecon.htm

Harvard Referencing Guide:

Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/libdocs/hsl-dvc1.pdf

Vancouver System of Referencing:

Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/tutorials/citing/vancouver.html

MLA System of Referencing:

Using Modern Language Assoication (MLA) Format: Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html

There are numerous electronic tools for managing research and information. Some of the more well-known are:

Procite:

Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://www.procite.com

EndNote:

Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 23 October, 2006:
http://www.EndNote.com

[ top ]