How to Reference Your Work at a University Level

Become a referencing know et al.

Getting used to the way uni works isn’t always easy.

Whether you're starting university for the first time or you’re getting back into the books again, it can be super confusing trying to figure out exactly how you’re supposed to correctly attribute your assessments and keep your tutors happy.

If you didn’t get the chance to learn accurate referencing in high school or TAFE, or you are new to studying, here are our tips.

What is referencing?

Before jumping right in, you’ll need to know the basics of referencing and why it’s important.

Referencing is basically the standardised practice of acknowledging the sources, authors or owners of the information that you have used in your work or assignments.

In most cases, when you complete an assignment, you will have to find and use works from other researchers to support your ideas or understanding of a theory.

When using the information from someone else’s work it is imperative that you attribute that source, so you don’t risk plagiarising that work.

What is plagiarism?

One of the last things you want to do when studying at any level is plagiarise someone else’s work.

Plagiarism is simply the practice of taking someone else’s ideas or work and passing it off as your own.

This doesn’t just apply to other academics or scholars. It applies to anyone’s work, so if you think you can cheat by copying your mate's essay or paying someone to write it for you, you’d be wrong, that also counts.

Plagiarism is considered a very serious offence when studying at a university level and if you find yourself getting caught breaking this rule you could face failure on an assignment, grade reduction, suspension, unit failure or even course dismissal.

Luckily, it is easy to avoid plagiarism: if you are ever unsure, always give a citation.

Styles of referencing

When it comes to referencing styles, there are a lot of different options, which is why it can be confusing when you first start uni.

While your tutor or professor should indicate which referencing style they would like you to use, the most common styles used in Australia are:

• APA or American Psychological Association, which is most used by psychology, English studies and the sciences.
• Harvard, which is very similar to APA and is most used by economics.
• MLA or Modern Language Association is used by the humanities.
• Chicago or Turabian style is most used by the fine arts, history, and business.

How do I reference?

Most universities will have generalised referencing guides on their websites if you’re stuck but there are some basic elements that need to be recorded for most styles.

• When citing in text or referencing in a bibliography you will always be required to provide the author/s name/s.
• Usually when attributing an author, you state their last name followed by the letter of their first name e.g. SMITH A.
• In the common case where there are three authors or more, state the first three and end the attribution with 'et al'.
• In some cases, the author's name may not be known, or the information may be published by an organisation instead of an individual. In this instance, you would attribute to the organisation or website that you have learned the information from.
• You will always need to include the title of the piece and publisher information, whether the source is a book, website, or journal article.
• The title is often attributed in italics and for books or journal articles make sure to include the edition or version you are accessing.
• In most cases, you would be referencing a certain part of a text rather than the whole thing. For this, you will need to include the exact page numbers that you used to it is easy for your tutor to find the information that you are referring to.
• For an individual page use 'p. 123' and for multiple pages use 'pp. 123-124'.
• For web pages and most online texts you will want to include the URL and the date that it was accessed.

Once you have all the required information, you want to record it all in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your work.

Take the time to make sure all the information is in the correct order per the referencing style you are using and keep each reference in alphabetical order on your bibliography page.

What is the difference between a bibliography and a citation?

An important distinction to make when attributing your work is the difference between an in-text citation and a full bibliography.

Whether you are paraphrasing or giving a direct quote you will want to attribute that exact information to the author, publishing date and sometimes the page number in your work.

A citation will depend on which referencing style you are using but they usually look like this: '(Smith, 2020)' or 'Smith (2020)'.

An in-text citation is important so that your tutor can easily find which source you are referring to on your bibliography.

Both are just as important as each other and work together to make sure you are correctly attributing your sources.

Referencing resources

If you’re a little bit overwhelmed by all this information and don’t want to spend too much time reading through referencing style guides, you might be please to find out that there are actually a lot of really useful tools online that will help you reference correctly and a lot more quickly.

A really popular tool is a website called Cite This for Me, which will basically do all the work for you.

All you need to do is provide the website with your sources DOI, URL, ISSN or ISBN, then pick your referencing style and it will find the source you are referring to and automatically generate a bibliography reference and in-text citation that you can copy and paste into your work.

A similar resource to Cite This for Me is an app called RefMe, if you prefer to do your work on your phone or tablet.

Depending on where you get your academic resources will also determine how you attribute. If you are using libraries like Google Scholar you will be able to access pre-generated refences in any style that you need just by clicking on the 'quotation make' button.

When writing your work in a Word document, there is a tab titled 'References' which will allow you to pick your preferred style, generate references and build a bibliography to help you save time.

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