During your course you will be asked to find information from various sources for essays and assignments. These will influence your thinking and you need to acknowledge the authors or creators who produced them. Referencing is the way you let others know which sources you have consulted as part of your work.

You must give proper acknowledgement to the creators of any sources that you have looked at as part of your work. It shows the reader the breadth of your research.

The reader may want to learn more from the source and will be able to trace it.

You will avoid any claims of copying or plagiarism. You may lose marks if you have not referenced your sources correctly.

Plagiarism:
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Plagiarism is using the work or ideas of someone else and presenting them as your own. This may be copying and pasting text or illustrations from print sources or the Internet without acknowledging where it came from, not using quotation marks around quotations or quoting or paraphrasing another’s work without mentioning the original source. Changing the odd word or two in a sentence is also viewed as plagiarism. Plagiarism is seen as a form of cheating and the college will penalise anyone who is found to have committed it.

The way to avoid plagiarism is to properly credit original sources using references and bibliographies.

A reference system is a set of rules for recording the details of a source. There are several systems and the one used most widely in the college is the Harvard system. Please check which system to use with your lecturer.

There are two places where you need to reference any sources you have used.

The first is when you mention a source in your text. This is also known as a citation and consists of the surname of the creator of the work and the date of publication, these are placed in brackets.

The second place is your reference list/bibliography at the end of your work. This gives more details about the source including title and publisher.

If you mention the author as part of the sentence you only need to put the date in brackets … according to Christie (2019). If the author is not mentioned then both the author and date appear in brackets e.g. (Christie, 2019).

‍Quotation
‍This is when you use the exact words from a work. The words quoted should have quotation marks at the beginning and end. These can be single ‘ or double ” please check which form your lecturer requires. You need to identify the author, the year it was published and the page number(s) where it can be found.

‍Paraphrasing
‍This is using your own words to describe what someone else has written. When paraphrasing you must be careful not to change the meaning of the original work. You need to identify the author, year of publication and page number(s) of the work you are paraphrasing.

‍Summarising
‍This is taking the main points of a work and giving a brief description of them. You must give details of the source you are summarising in your work and mention the author and publication date.