Referencing
At university you will be required to identify and acknowledge the exact sources of the information, ideas and quotations that you have used to produce your essay.
A list of these sources at the end of your essay is known as a bibliography. However, they will also need to be referenced in your text whenever they are used.
There are four important reasons for referencing your material:
- To support a specific point, claim or argument.
- To give credit to the source of your ideas. This is not just a question of ethics or good manners but a matter of law regarding copyright. The material you use
- May be the intellectual property of someone else. Failure to provide proper acknowledgment is known as plagiarism
- To enable your reader to find the exact edition or reprint of the work that you consulted and so assess for themselves its worth and relevance for your argument
- To demonstrate your familiarity with the literature relevant for your essay.
There are three basic systems of referencing material:
Most disciplines and departments will insist on a particular system of referencing. It may be that you will have to write several essays for different lecturers whose subject disciplines each require different referencing requirements and conventions.
It is up to you to make sure that you know which system is required for your essay.