European Studies Writing Lab

Plagiarism, Referencing and APA Style European Studies and The Hague University of Applied Sciences have a strict policy towards plagiarism and insist that all students use APA Style referencing to prevent accidental plagiarism. APA Style is a set of rules for writing research reports and documenting sources in academic writing that was created by the American Psychological
Association to standardise practices in the social sciences. It is the standard for academic writing at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and includes a standard format for
Research Reports and for documenting information you use from sources.
Documenting Sources and Plagiarism
Plagiarism refers to using someone else’s ideas or words without giving them credit or passing someone else’s work off as your own. Most of the time, this happens by accident: a student borrows some information or text from a website and forgets to properly indicate what they’ve done. There are more extreme cases, in which students deliberately copy someone else’s work, in violation of the Code of Conduct at European Studies, which insists that “we are always honest with each other and with ourselves,”1 but thankfully, these cases are rare.
It is essential that, whenever you write something, you make sure that you clearly label anything you did not write yourself so that you never have to be accused of plagiarism. APA style gives you the tools to do this.
In-Text Referencing
Whenever you want to include ideas or text in an assignment that you did not think of yourself, you need to follow three simple steps:
1. Use a Signal Phrase
Writers must introduce borrowed words or ideas by using phrases like "According to" or "As
Smith said," in order to be clear about where the information came from.
2. Quote or Paraphrase
Once you have a signal phrase in place,