Top Tips: Referencing
By The Student Team
Referencing is one of the key new skills you will develop while at University. It is incredibly important that you reference all your work in an accurate manner in order to avoid plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious academic offence, but there’s no need for you to stress about it! If you follow our following tips mentioned in the student team’s conversation and use the Library’s guide, you’ll be a pro soon enough!
If you’d rather listen to the podcast by Student Team members Jia Xuen and Lili, click on our recording below with its transcript here!
Dealing with different citation styles
Use your student handbook or the course handbook as it might specify the citation style to use e.g. Harvard or Chicago style referencing. Make sure that you are consistent in your referencing and stick to that one style and never combine two styles in one piece of work as it will cost you marks.
If you’re not sure whether to give a list of references or a bibliography, this information can be present again in your course handbook.
Practice that helps you in easing citation
How you do it really depends on your preference, but a good habit is to write down the information while you can so you don’t need to spend time looking for it.
You can create a document or excel sheet and make a note of the page numbers, so you don’t have to go back every time to reference something and search through a whole book or a journal article to find that idea. Another thing to do is to make a note of the year, the author and if it’s an online source then its website address, because this really helps to make sure that you are referencing the correct source in a situation where there are multiple works of the same author.
If you like to do your in-text citation referencing in one go, you can highlight the source of information and put the link inside of your work.
Guidance on citation styles
You could refer to the UoM online referencing guide which lists down different situations that you might face in referencing for example, multiple authors. They also have different citation styles such as APA and Vancouver.
You could also learn more about citation throughout the MLE online resources on referencing which covers the basics on referencing and avoiding plagiarism. Besides, you could also have a look at the example work done in peer review articles as they tend to have a great referencing list.
Citation tools and proofing your work
The Library also supplies management software such as Endnote and Mendeley to all UoM students for free. You can now use them at your personal device and here is some guidance and a clear comparison on how to use them.
However, it should be noted that sometimes you could find a disparity between the actual product of the management software and also the required format by the University. Hence it is always important to double check the work and compare it with the Library’s guide on referencing. You should also check for any typos as they could cost you marks.
Thank you for reading/ listening to our conversation on referencing tips. These tips will be incredibly helpful to you when you’re referencing your next essay!
Make sure to come back to them whenever you need it or visit the University of Manchester library’s VERY useful Referencing guide as well as additional online resources offered by the award-winning My Learning Essential program!
