Citing & Referencing
Basic Principals of Citing and Referencing
- You must highlight all the sources you quote, paraphrase, summarise, or refer to within your document, regardless of where you obtained them, or their format (text, image, sound, etc.).
- You do this by providing a brief citation for the sources at point of use within your text. Depending on what style of citing and referencing you are using in-text citations might take the form of author-date citations, or numeric citations. More on this later.
- If you use the exact words of another author you are quoting them. In this case you must always enclose their words in quotation marks to highlight this, as well as acknowledging the source with an in-text citation.
- If you express another author’s ideas in your own words, this is called paraphrasing. You must still acknowledge the source of the idea by way of in-text citation, but as you are not using the other author’s exact words you do not use quotation marks.
- The brief in-text citation points your readers to the reference list where you will provide extended details of the source. The reference list is usually placed at the end of a text (i.e. essay or chapter). It contains a detailed reference for each of the different sources that you cited within your text. Each reference provides sufficient information to enable your readers to fully identify the source, and to find it for themselves. The exact details included in each reference will depend on the type of source and the style of citing and referencing that you are using. Furthermore, some styles of referencing call the reference list the “works cited” list. More on this too, later.
- Sometimes, you may be asked to include a bibliography in your work. A bibliography differs from a reference list in that it provides a complete list of all the sources you consulted in preparing the document, whether you cited them in your text or not. It can also include titles useful as background reading. The bibliography is placed at the end of your work.
Check out this video to get a really quick summary of the practice of citing and referencing!
Citation: A (Very) Brief Introduction was created by North Carolina State University Libraries . It is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commerical, Share Alike Licence
