Referencing help

This page is intended to give you help with referencing and avoiding plagiarism.

What is ‘referencing’?

Referencing is a way of acknowledging that you have used ideas and written material belonging to another author. It enhances the presentation of your work, often improves your marks, and helps you to avoid plaigiarism.

As well as books and journal articles, you may also need to acknowledge ideas from newspaper articles, conference proceedings, maps, websites, blogs, or personal communications such as emails and interviews.

Help with referencing

The Library’s reference management page gives you information on how to reference various resources (e.g. books, journal articles & websites) together with guidelines on how to cite sources within your work. We provide citing & referencing guides for the Harvard & Vancouver styles of referencing only.  I strongly advise you to check your course guidelines or to speak with you tutor/supervisor first to see if they are happy for you to use these referencing styles.

For those who have access, Olivia, the library’s online teaching course, provides detailed information about referencing & plagiarism. It is available on Blackboard. There are units on plagiarism & referencing. You can refer to Olivia for other information as well, such as search tips, database tutorials, etc. It will be available to you until you graduate.

Reference management software & training

The Library also provides information and training in using RefWorks, Reference Manager, EndNote, and EndNote Web. These bibliographic software packages allow you to manage all the references you need for your papers, reports, theses, or essays by enabling you to keep them in your own personal database or library. They also enable you to cite and create reference lists at the click of a button. To find out more about these resources visit the Reference Management pages of the Library website.