This brief study guide:referencing and bibliographies aims to help you to understand why you should include references to the information sources that you use to underpin your writing. It explains the main principles of accurately referencing such sources in your work. (Study guide)
Why referencing?
When you are writing an essay, report, dissertation or any other form of academic writing, your own thoughts and ideas inevitably build on those of other writers, researchers or teachers. It is essential that you acknowledge your debt to the sources of data, research and ideas on which you have drawn by including references to, and full details of, these sources in your work. Referencing your work allows the reader:
to distinguish your own ideas and findings from those you have drawn from the work of others;
to follow up in more detail the ideas or facts that you have referred to.
Before you write
Whenever you read or research material for your writing, make sure that you include in your notes, or on any photocopied material, the full publication details of each relevant text that you read. These details should include:
surname(s) and initial(s) of the author(s);
the date of publication;
the title of the text;
if it is a paper, the title of the journal and volume number;
if it is a chapter of an edited book, the book’s title and editor(s)
the publisher and place of publication*;
the first and last page numbers if it is a journal article or a chapter in an edited book.
For particularly important points, or for parts of texts that you might wish to quote word for word, also include in your notes the specific page reference.
* This study guide wants you to; please note that the publisher of a book should not be confused with the printer. The publisher’s name is normally on a book’s main title page, and often on the book’s spine too.
When to use references
Your source should be acknowledged every time the point that you make, or the data or other information that you use, is substantially that of another writer and not your own. As a very rough study guide, while the introduction and the conclusions to your writing might be largely based on your own ideas, within the main body of your report, essay or dissertation, you would expect to be drawing on, and thus referencing your debt to, the work of others in each main section or paragraph. Look at the ways in which your sources use references in their own work, and for further guidance consult the companion guide Avoiding Plagiarism .
Referencing styles
There are many different referencing conventions in common use. Each department will have its own preferred format, and every journal or book editor has a set of ‘house rules’. This guide aims to explain the general principles by giving details of the two most commonly used formats, the ‘author, date’ system and footnotes or
endnotes. Format for Project Reports Once you have understood the principles common to all referencing systems you should be able to apply the specific rules set by your own department.
How to reference using the ‘author, date’ system
In the ‘author, date’ system (often referred to as the ‘Harvard’ system) very brief details of the source from which a discussion point or piece of factual information is drawn are included in the text. Full details of the source are then given in a reference list or bibliography at the end of the text. This allows the writer to fully acknowledge her/his sources, without significantly interrupting the flow of the writing.

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