ELISE for Postgraduate Students - Enabling Library Information Skills for Everyone

Acknowledging your sources

It is imperative in academic writing that you acknowledge the sources of your information, ideas and evidence. The system which enables you to do this is known as “referencing”. No matter who or what the source is, it needs to be referenced – and referenced correctly – in order to avoid plagiarism.

As discussed in Module 1, ‘sources’ include books, journal or magazine articles, newspapers, government or institutional reports, theses, websites, electronic journals or conference presentations. Your sources may also include your lecturers or your fellow students.

There are a number of reasons for acknowledging sources, including:

• showing respect for the intellectual property of others;
• showing evidence of wide reading;
• providing the means by which people reading what you have written can refer to your sources to read further if desired.

Different types of referencing

There are many different methods of acknowledging or referencing your sources. Some Faculties and Schools at UNSW have style guides which direct you to use a particular referencing system for your assignments; others require that you choose one system and use it consistently. Please check with your lecturer to see what rules will apply to your assignments; there is nothing worse than losing marks or failing an assignment because you have used the wrong system of referencing, or have applied it incorrectly.

Referencing systems can be divided into two main types: the footnote or endnote referencing method (e.g. the Oxford system); and the in-text citation method – also known as the ‘Author-Date style’ (e.g. the Harvard system). Both types of systems require you to reference your sources both in the body of your assignment (in-text citation or footnote/endnote) and at the end (reference list). For guides to referencing systems commonly used at UNSW, follow the Referencing & Plagiarism link on the Learning Centre’s website.

In-text citation

When you include information from another source in your written work, you must signify this by including an in-text citation at the appropriate point in the paragraph. The information must be in parentheses and include the author’s name, the year of publication (and the page number if including a direct quote), e.g.:

• There are four possible sources of pay dissatisfaction that have been commonly identified (Long 2002, pp. 72-80) …

If the author is part of the grammar of the sentence, then the parentheses are placed around the year and page number only, e.g.:

• There are good reasons for management to avoid employee dissatisfaction with base pay. Long (2002, pp. 72-80) identifies four possible sources of pay dissatisfaction …

The reference list

At the end of your essay or report you must include a list of references – a list of all the sources you have used throughout the body of your assignment. The reference list must be sorted alphabetically by the author’s family name.

If there is no author noted, for example, when citing a company report, then you should list the source according to the first letter of the name of the organisation that produced the report. In the case of a web-based reference, the name of the owner or sponsor of the website is required.

When there is no author, organisation name or website sponsor, you should use the title of the report or article for your alphabetical listing.

For detailed information, guidance and examples of different sources see the EDU Harvard Referencing Guide.

Click the drop-down button for an example of what a reference list looks like.

View example

During the course of your studies, you may notice a slight variation in the styles of referencing (both for in-text and reference lists) between your course study guide, textbooks and other research material you access. Don’t worry too much about this variation. The important thing is to be consistent in the way you reference your sources for your work.

Avoiding plagiarism

According to the UNSW Learning Centre (2006), the three major issues which need to be addressed in order to avoid plagiarism are:

• ‘Unfamiliarity with the concept of plagiarism; knowing how it occurs, and developing the necessary academic skills to avoid plagiarism.’ (UNSW Learning Centre, 2006)

Not only should you provide in-text citations for each piece of information or idea you take from another source, you should also indicate to the reader whether you are directly quoting the author’s words or paraphrasing the material.

If you present the work of other writers as your own, that is, if you fail to make it clear that you are either directly quoting or paraphrasing from another source, then you are plagiarising.

Note the following examples which may help you understand how to avoid this serious error.

View example

You should familiarise yourself with the official UNSW policy on Plagiarism which is to be found on the Learning Centre site referenced below. You may be surprised to learn that reusing your own assignment which has previously been marked in another course, may be considered to be plagiarism, as is knowingly allowing your work to be copied by someone else. Plagiarism doesn’t stop at the written word either. You must acknowledge your sources in oral presentations as well, either verbally or in any visual aid or handouts you provide.

More details about plagiarism are available from UNSW Learning Centre.

Copyright and other legal and ethical issues in the use of information

Copyright is a legal mechanism for protecting the intellectual property of authors and creators. As a student, you have certain privileges in making single copies or downloads of material not available to the rest of the population, provided those copies are for research and study purposes and they are not more than a “reasonable proportion” of the work copied/downloaded.

The following statement is taken directly from the official UNSW A-Z Student Guide.

View example

Licensed Information Resources

UNSW Library purchases licences to over 400 databases and many thousands of electronic full-text journals. Most licences are for the academic use of current UNSW staff and students. Therefore, you should not use these resources to benefit any other organization, especially a commercial one.

Many providers now automatically monitor their licensed resources, and can deny access to the whole UNSW community if they detect an instance of “unusual” activity. If you are not sure about the ethics or legality of using UNSW licensed resources, check with Library staff by using the Library contacts list provided on the Welcome page of this tutorial.

Worked example

In the worked example for Module 3, the following source details were saved.

Assume you have read the items mentioned, critically evaluated them and have referred to them in the text of your assignment. The items will have to be re-formatted according to the referencing system guidelines you are using. (In this example, we will use the Harvard system and refer to the Harvard Referencing Guide provided by the UNSW Faculty of Commerce and Economics Education Development Unit).

All of these items are books. I need to find the following information, and place it in this order:

In–text citation:

(Ainsworth, Smith & Millership 2002)
or if a part of the grammar of the sentence: Ainsworth, Smith and Millership (2002) reported that . . . .
(Continue to follow this pattern for the other book references you have used.)

Journal example

The search of Business Source Premier found this journal article reference:

In–text citation

(Morgeson, 2005) or Morgeson (2005) states that . . .

Electronic example

The following source was found and accessed on-line
Lessons learned from self-managed work teams
Business Horizons, July-August, 1994 by Dale E. Yeatts, Martha Hipskind, Debra Barnes

Reference list example

You can now start compiling your reading list. Remember to keep the list in alphabetical order by family name of the first author. Note that when a reference runs over more than 1 line, the second and subsequent lines are indented.

Practice activity

#1 Referencing

This exercise has been adapted, with permission, from the UNSW MBT Learning Guide, 2006, p. 52.

Here is some information about a book, an article and a website that you might have used for an assignment. Make a reference list for these three sources. Remember to put them in alphabetical order.

1. You quoted from a textbook called What makes teams work: how to create and maintain a winning team in business and sport which has been published during 2004. The authors are David Parkin, Paul Bourke and Russ Gleeson and the Sydney-based publisher is Pan Macmillan.
2. On 30 September, 2005 you accessed the website of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and obtained some statistics from their 2005 report number 6302.0 - Average Weekly Earnings, Australia.
3. You read an interesting article called Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams on page 408-437 of an American journal called Administrative Science Quarterly published in 1993. The volume number was 38, and it was issue no. 3 for that year. The author was James R. Barker.

View answer

#2 Plagiarism

To test your understanding of plagiarism, go to the UNSW Learning Centre site and take the short quiz which is available there. You will get immediate feedback on your answers.