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Culinary Arts and Food Technology Subject Guide

Referencing and citing

Introduction to the Harvard Style

Every scholarly discipline has a preferred format or style of referencing their publications. The style used in the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology is the Harvard style, also known as the "author-date" style.

The Harvard system is made up of 3 components:

  • Citation- provides brief details of the author and date of publication for referencing the work in the body of the text.
  • Reference list- an alphabetical list at the end of the essay or assignment of all references cited in your work with additional details provided to identify each source.
  • Bibliography- a more comprehensive list of sources used to research your assignment, including those not cited within the text. Documents are referenced in the same way as in a reference list.

Citation

A citation should be used within the text of your work if you:

  • use a direct quote from someone else's work
  • summarise or paraphrase someone else's work

Details provided are brief and include the author's surname, the year of publication, and the page number.

e.g. According to Reilly (2006, p. 66) theories are tested by sample statistics.

Reference list

There are a number of details that can be included in a reference depending on the type of source (i.e. a book, journal, conference paper, etc). As many of the following items as possible should be included:

  • Author(s) or editor(s) full name or the group/body/organisation responsible
  • Title of article or chapter
  • Name of journal, periodical or book
  • Edition
  • Publisher’s name
  • Place of publication (for a book)
  • Year of publication
  • Volume number (for journal)
  • Issue number (for journal)
  • Page numbers

Examples including punctuation

Books

Reilly, J. (2006) Using Statistics. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.

Print journal article

Randler, C. (2010) 'The early bird really does get the worm' , Harvard Business Review, 88 (7/8), pp. 30-31.

Government publications

Ireland. Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (2009) Future Skills Requirements of the Food and Beverage Sector. Dublin: Forfas.

Theses

Guy, P. D. (2009) As Mirrors are lonely: a lacanian reading of three Irish novelists. Unpublished PhD thesis. Tallaght Institute of Technology.

Citing electronic resources

Electronic sources can include web pages, online journals, cd-roms, email, etc. It can be quite difficult to reference these sources as the details provided can vary dramatically but as many of the following as possible should be included:

  • Name of author or editor
  • Title of the page (look in the bar at the top of your browser)
  • Title of the site (go to the site's homepage)
  • Date page, last update or copyright date
  • The full URL of the web page
  • The date you accessed the page
  • Any other details that might help someone find the page

Examples:

Web site

MABS (2010) A Guide to Managing your Money and Dealing with Debt. Available at : http://www.mabs.ie/publications/leaflets/managing_money.pdf (Accessed: 07 October 2010)

Journal article

Myers, M.P., Yang, J. & Stampe, P. (1999) 'Visualization and functional analysis of a maxi-K channel (mSlo) fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP)', EJB: Electronic Journal of Biotechnology, 2(3), 140-151, Available at: http://www.ejb.org/content/vol2/issue3/full/3/index.html (Accessed 21 May 2002). 

With thanks to our colleagues in Tallaght campus for this content.

Avoiding plagiarism

Plagiarism means using work done by other people and trying to pass it off as your own work instead of attributing it to its real author. The old-fashioned word for it is "cogging," but by any name, it is cheating.

If you copy something written by another person without saying where you got it from, you are plagiarising. This includes using sentences or paragraphs by another person, using material from the internet, using maps or pictures created by others, using other people's ideas, and even using your own work in multiple assignments.

It is legitimate to use other people's work as long as you clearly state it is their work. This is usually done by citing the author and including the author in your bibliography, and by placing the author's words between  "  " quotation marks.

TU Dublin uses a plagiarism checker called SafeAssign. This is able to pick out and flag up pieces of text which are likely to come from other pieces of work. Students may use SafeAssign to check their own work before submitting it for assessment. A draft piece of coursework will not be "done" for plagiarism, but a final submitted piece of coursework can be.

Being caught plagiarising can have serious consequences. The General Assessment Regulations outlines what procedures may be invoked in such cases: