Guides

Citation guides

Our citation generator is great for automatically compiling your bibliographies, but it's still important you know the process of creating a bibliography manually, and the reasons why citing your sources is necessary.

For these reasons we have prepared the following set of guides to assist you:

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Referencing your sources - A simple introduction

In higher education when ever you include a fact or piece of information in an assignment or essay you must also include where and how you found that piece of information. Even if you 'just know it' - it has to have come from somewhere. This is because in higher education assignment writing you are not just being tested on what you know, but rather what you are able to find out and what you think it means.

Details about where you found the information utilised to write your assignment are kept in two chapters right at the very end, called the reference list and bibliography. The reference list is where you list the direct quotes or paraphrased findings of another author. The bibliography is where you list sources you've read for background information, but did not directly include in your work. In addition, a small mention to the author and publish year, within brackets, must be given in the main body of your assignment wherever you make a reference.

Referencing Styles

To make the reference list and bibliography consistent and easy to read across different papers there are predefined styles stating how to set them out - these are called citation styles. Different subjects prefer to each use different styles. The following are the most popular:

• APA. APA is an author/date based style. This means emphasis is placed on the author and the date of a piece of work to uniquely identify it.
• MLA. MLA is most often applied by the arts and humanities, particularly in the USA. It is arguably the most well used of all of the citation styles.
• Harvard. Harvard is very similar to APA. Where APA is primarily used in the USA, Harvard referencing is the most well used referencing style in the UK and Australia, and is encouraged for use with the humanities.
• Vancouver. The Vancouver system is mainly used in medical and scientific papers.
• Chicago and Turabian. These are two separate styles but are very similar, just like Harvard and APA. These are widely used for history and economics.

Regardless of what subject you're writing for, you should use the style your university and tutor recommend and you must not mix-and-match. At the moment Cite This For Me generates references for the APA, MLA, and Harvard referencing systems only.

Plagiarism

If you quote or paraphrase another author's work without including a reference to it you are plagiarising. Not only is it very easy to detect plagiarism using online services like Turn It In, but it is also very easy for your tutor to spot it just by reading your work. Remember - you are not being marked on your ability to write facts or show off what you know. Any assumptions or facts you state must have someone else's credible work to back you up. Plagiarism does not only mean cheating, it is mainly used to describe forgetting or not realising to include a reference to other's work or theories.