1.1 Introduction to Referencing

Referencing is the process of recording details of the secondary sources (books, journal articles, electronic sources etc) you refer to in a piece of work. You need to acknowledge these sources for two reasons –
• firstly to protect yourself against any accusations of plagiarism. The University of Hertfordshire’s UPR 17-1 defines plagiarism as “ the representation of another person's work as the candidate's own, either by extensive unacknowledged quotation or paraphrasing or by direct copying of another person's work”
• secondly to allow you and whoever is assessing your work to be able to easily trace the original source if need be.

You need to refer to your sources in two places-
• in the body of your work
• in the list of references at the end.

What follows shows you how to do this for various types of material: books, journals and electronic resources, preceded by a section on how to deal with quotes. The Harvard system of referencing is used for printed sources. At present, this does not cover electronic sources, but we will be using a commonly used set of guidelines for the latter.

Please read through the handout, and try the practical exercises in Parts 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5

1.2 Using Quotations

The following guidance on using quotations applies to all forms of material – books, journals and electronic items.

It is appropriate to use quotations to support or illustrate points you wish to make in your assessed work, but they should be used relatively sparingly, and should be as brief as possible.

The Harvard system requires you to use the author’s name, and then in brackets the year of publication and the page number on which the quote appears. Quotations of more than two lines in length should be indented. Note the use of the colon as well as to mark the boundary between your own words and the