Referencing & Plagiarism

Referencing is probably the bane of every university student's life. I still don't really understand it. But there's pretty much no way around it, you will have to reference. Luckily for you I've figured out some tips & tricks to make those pages of sources a little easier to manage.

In any essay you write you must list the sources behind your ideas & quotes. You have to give credit to the original authors of these ideas in order to not get done for plagiarism (stealing their ideas). It's pretty scary to begin with actually, your university will probably put a lot of emphasis on how important it is to not plagiarise, and with good reason too. But don't be scared, referencing isn't quite as hard and confusing as it may seem when you have the internet on your side. 

Firstly, know your referencing system. There are a fair few and different universities & schools use different ones. The way in which you reference depends upon which system you are supposed to use. So it's pretty important that you know which style you are aiming for, you may even lose credit for using the wrong system. Being (basically) a joint honours student I had the lovely task of having to learn two different referencing systems - one for each school, so I learnt how to 'cheat' my way through pretty quickly.

Neil's toolbox is an online referencing generator which you can use to create bibliographies and references. Okay so you do still have to put in the hard work of finding all of the sources but you just have to enter the details about that source, such as the author's name or the book you got it from, into the Harvard Reference Generator, and it will produce the reference for you. Pretty handy if you're referencing lots of sources - it does, of course, only work if you are supposed to be using the Harvard system.

Another online referencing problem solver I found myself referring back to time & time again was the University of Leeds' library's guide to Harvard Referencing. This page lists all of the problems that you might come across whilst trying to reference, such as how to reference a DVD or what to do if there is more than two authors, and tells you how to rectify them. Again, this is probably only helpful if you are using the Harvard Referencing system - but I have had a look and they do seem to list other systems here, so you may find the one you are supposed to use.

The key thing to referencing is to make sure when you're researching for an essay that you keep hold of the information of that source, whether it be from a book or from a webpage. This will make it much easier to put in your references when you start writing your bibliography and save you desperately trying to figure out who said what.

Don't panic, universities put a lot of emphasis on plagiarism and whilst it is important it is also easy to avoid. Good luck & happy essay writing! xx