The OWL (Online Writing Lab) is a good place to start if you need advice or help with paraphrasing, avoiding plagiarism or getting started with a particular citation style in your academic writing.
Referencing or citing the information sources used in assignments and research is essential to avoid plagiarism and to maintain academic integrity.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, plagiarism is
"the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own".
The best way to avoid plagiarism is to use a system to reference the information you use when researching for your essays, assignments and dissertations. You have probably seen this done many times.
A reference system will usually consist of:
A citation describes the information source you used in a way that would enable someone else to find the same information.
A typical citation will look something like this:
Jennings, A. (2004) Structures : from theory to practice, London: Spon.
An in-text citation consists of a shorter version of the citation within the text of your work, after you refer to a source.
This will look something like the following:
"Beams are straight bars which carry transverse loading by means of bending action" (Jennings 2004, p.177).
A reference list is simply a list of full citations for all the material you have referred to in your text.
A bibliography is similar to a reference list but it includes citations for all the material you have used in your research, including material that you did not refer to in the text (e.g., background reading).
You will need to use a reference or cite a source if you have:
There are many different systems used to create references.
Harvard Referencing is one of the most widely used.
Your lecturer or supervisor should make clear what system you are required to use, so check with your school or project supervisor.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
