REFERENCING STYLES

Referencing styles are a set of rules that tells you how you should acknowledge the intellectual
work of people that you use in your research. Referencing is an important part of successful
academic writing.

Every time you make a statement, a claim, an assertion, an opinion, you MUST show your
audience the EVIDENCE on which it is based. Research study, especially at the Bachelor level,
is built on establishing the validity, reliability, integrity, and relevance of the evidence that
underpins one’s opinions.

When you refer to someone else’s words or ideas in your text, the source should be
acknowledged by stating the author and year. You must always acknowledge your sources
otherwise you will be guilty of plagiarism. REFERENCING contains two crucial elements:

 An in-text citation
 An entry in the reference list at the end of your assignment

IN-TEXT CITATIONS

The citation will contain enough details for the reader to identify the source listed in the
reference list. In APA, it is known as an author-date style of referencing because only the
author’s surname and the year of publication are necessary to refer to in the body of the essay
itself. The rest of the information can be found in the reference list, at the end of your essay.
Source material must be documented in the body of the paper by citing the author(s) and date(s)
of the sources. The underlying principle is that ideas and words of others must be formally
acknowledged. The reader can obtain the full source citation from the list of references that
follows the body of the paper.

You don’t need to put the full title of the book or article into your essay paragraphs. All you need
is the author’s surname, and the year it was published, and the page number (most of the time).

A citation is a way of giving credit to individuals for their creative and intellectual works that
you utilized to support your research. It can also be used to locate particular sources and combat
plagiarism. Typically, a citation can include the author’s name, date, location of the publishing
company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

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A citation style dictates the information necessary for a citation and how the information is
ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting.

How do I choose a citation style?

There are many different ways of citing resources from your research. The referencing styles

sometimes depends on the academic discipline involved. For example:

APA (American Psychological Association) is used by Education, Psychology, and Sciences

MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used by the Humanities

Chicago/Turabian style is generally used by Business, History, and the Fine Arts

Referencing Styles

There are four widely-used referencing styles or conventions. They are called the MLA (Modern
Languages Association) system, the APA (American Psychological Association) system,
the Harvard system, and the MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) system.

If you are producing essays for a particular institution or even a particular department make sure
you know what system it is using. Your tutors may specify one of the four listed above or they
may use another one entirely. Some departments will produce sheets explaining which system
they want you to use.

You can also find detailed guides to these systems in your institution’s library or on the internet.
The Modern Humanities Research Association also publish the MHRA Style Book which is
available from bookshops like Blackwells for around a fiver.

The following sections give the important aspects of the four conventions. For more detail, you
will need to look in some of the places I’ve suggested.

The MLA system is a parenthetical system: i.e. bracketed references in the body of your essay
are linked to full length citations in the bibliography at the end of your essay. The bracket in the
body of the essay contains only the author’s surname and the page number or numbers you are

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referring to. For example: There are a number of different referencing styles or conventions but
there are four that are used most widely. (Kennedy, 17).
If your essay quotes from two or more works by the same author then the bracketed reference
should include a shortened version of the title to indicate which book is being referred to.
(Kennedy, New Relations, 26)
A bibliography compiled according to MLA conventions lists items alphabetically by the
author’s last name. Each entry should include, in the following order: the author’s name in full,
the title of the book, the place of publication, the publisher, and the date. For example: Kennedy,
David. New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994. Bridgend: Seren, 1996.
Pay attention to how the entry is punctuated as that is part of the system too.
The APA system is also a parenthetical system but the bracketed references in the body of your
essay are: the author’s surname, the date of publication and the page or page numbers you are
referring to. For example: There are a number of different referencing styles or conventions but
there are four that are used most widely (Kennedy, 2003, p. 17). The reference always goes at the
end of the sentence before the full stop.
A bibliography compiled according to APA conventions lists items alphabetically by the author’s
last name. Each entry should include, in the following order: the author’s surname, their first
initial, the date of publication in brackets, the title of the book, the place of publication and the
publisher. For example: Kennedy, D. (1996) New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry
1980-1994. Bridgend: Seren. Again, pay attention to how the entry is punctuated as that is part of
the system too.
BOOKS AND JOURNALS

Most of your citations should come from books (in the library) and journals (also known as
periodicals).

There are different ways that you can structure your sentences, you might want to include the
author’s surname into the sentence itself.

When the names of the authors of a source are part of the formal structure of the sentence, the
year of publication appears in parentheses following the identification of the authors.

Consider the following example:

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Veish and Langer (2015, p. 39) found that micro needle patches for monitoring a diabetic
patients’ blood glucose levels helps them to easily manage their need for insulin.

[Note: and is used when multiple authors are identified as part of the formal structure of the
sentence. Compare this to the example in the following section.]

When the authors of a source are not part of the formal structure of the sentence, both the authors
and year of publication appear in parentheses.

Consider the following example:

Reviews of research on religion and health have concluded that at least some types of religious
behaviours are related to higher levels of physical and mental health (Agli et al., 2014;
DeAngelis & Ellison, 2018; Krause & Hayward, 2016; Jones, 2018; Salsman et al., 2015;
VanderWeele, 2017).

[Note: & is used when multiple authors are identified in parenthetical material. Note also that
when several sources are cited parenthetically, they are ordered alphabetically by first authors'
surnames and separated by semicolons.]

Also please note that no page number is included in the above example because it is the whole
study or whole book that is being referred to.

MULTIPLE AUTHORS

When a source that one or two authors, include the author name(s) every time the source is cited.
In parenthetical citations, use an ampersand (&) between names for a work with two authors or
before the last author when all names must be included to avoid ambiguity. In narrative citations,
spell out the word “and”.

Consider the following examples:

(Luna, 2020)

Luna (2020) state ….

(Salas & D’Agostino, 2020)

Salas and D’Agonostino (2020) argue that…

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When a source that has three or more authors is cited, include the name of only the first author
plus “et al.” (an abbreviation of “et alia” which means “and others”) in every citation, including
the first citation, unless doing so would create ambiguity.

Consider the following example:

Reviews of research on religion and health have concluded that at least some types of religious
behaviours are related to higher levels of physical and mental health (Salsman et al., 2015, p.
3761). Salsman et al. (2015, p. 3761) showed that ...

In the reference list a source which has three or more authors, ALL the authors (up to 20) are
spelt out in the reference list. If there are more than 21 authors “…” is used between the 19th
author and the last author. APA 7th ed. replaces all authors between the 19th and last author with
“. . .”.

For example:

Kalnay, E., Kanamitsu, M., Kistler, R., Collins, W., Deaven, D., Gandin, L., Iredell, M.,
Saha, S., White, G., Woolen, J., Zhu, Y., Chelliah, M., Ebisuzaki, W., Higgins, W.,
Janowiak, J., Mo, K.C., Ropelewski, C., Wang, J., Leetmaa, A., … Joseph, D. (1996).
The NCEP/NCAR 40-year reanalysis project. Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society, 77(3), 437-471. http://doi.org/fg6rf9

And in the citation, it is (Kalnay et al., 1996)

AVOIDING AMBIGUITY – WHICH ONE IS WHICH?

Sometimes multiple works with three or more authors and the same publication year shorten to
the same in-text citation, which creates ambiguity (more than one interpretation). To avoid this,
when the in-text citations of multiple works with three or more authors shorten to the same form,
write out as many names as needed to distinguish the references and abbreviate the rest of the
names to “et al.” in every citation.

For example, two works have the following authors:

Maxwell, Scourfield, Holland, Featherstone, and Lee (2012)

Maxwell, Scourfield, Featherstone, Holland, and Tolman (2012)

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Works With the Same Author And Same Year

When multiple references have an identical author (or authors) and publication year, include a
lowercase letter (a, b, c, etc.) after the year. The year-letter combination is used in both the in-
text citation and the refence list entry. Use only the year with a letter in the in-text citation, even
if the reference list entry contains a more specific date.

For example:

(Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012a)

Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller (2012b)

And

(Sifuentes, n.d.-a, n.d.-b)

Assign the letters a, b, etc. in the order the works appear in your reference list. Your reference
list is arranged alphabetically by author, then year, then title. In the titles, J comes before O, so
these two references will be ordered like this in the reference list:

Judge, T. A., & Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. (2012a). Job attitudes. Annual Review of Psychology,
63, 341-67. https://doi.org/10.10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100511

Judge, T. A., & Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. (2012b). On the value of aiming high: The causes and
consequences of ambition. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(4), 758-775.
https://doi.org/10.1037.a0028084

Both these citations shortened to Maxwell et al. (2012). To avoid ambiguity when citing them
both in your work, cite them as follows:

Maxwell, Scourfield, Holland, et al. (2012)

Maxwell, Scourfield, Featherstone, et al. (2012)

Because “et al.” is plural (meaning “and others”, it cannot stand for only one name. When only
the final author is different, spell out all names in every citation.

Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Jones-Miller (2015)

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Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Weintraub (2015)

Refer to APA referencing styles for more details.

The Harvard system is another parenthetical system and the bracketed references in the body of
your essay are: the author’s surname and the date of publication. The list of works at the end of
the essay is headed ‘References’. The works listed in it appear in alphabetical order by the
author’s surname and follow the same format as the APA system.
The MHRA system does not use bracketed references in the body of an essay. Instead,
superscript numbers like this 1 are linked to a sequence of notes which appear either at the foot of
the page or in a section at the end of your essay. The note contains the full reference for the book
or article you are referring to. Here’s what an MHRA note reference looks like:
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David Kennedy, New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980-1994. (Bridgend:
Seren, 1996), p.26.
“Plagiarism, specifically, is a term used to describe a practice that involves knowingly taking and
using another person’s work and claiming it, directly or indirectly, as your own.” (Neville, 2007,
p. 28)
PLAGIARISM
Generally, plagiarism is taken very seriously, both legally and ethically. It can lead to
disciplinary action such as expulsion from the University. Additionally, plagiarizing will damage
your reputation and credibility as a scholar in Western academia. Plagiarism can be intentional
(purchasing a research paper online or sharing a test with a friend) or unintentional (improperly
citing a source in a paper or using an author’s words without giving her/him credit). This below
list, from Plagiarism.org, identifies some specific forms of plagiarism:
 “turning in someone else’s work as your own,
 Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
 Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
 Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
 Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
 Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your
work, whether you give credit or not”

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 It might seem like using the ideas of others is a problem. However, this is not the case.
Scholarship is a conversation; that is, you will be expected to read, analyze, and respond
to the ideas of others when writing your papers. The key to doing this without
plagiarizing is to cite your sources!
Take good notes
While researching, be sure to take note of important quotes and passages that you think you
might use in your paper.
Note the citation information—the author, title, and page number, so that you can easily cite it in
your paper.
Develop a system of note-taking that works for you.
Cite correctly
“Any time you use words from another source, such as a Web site, book, journal article, or even
a friend’s English paper, you must give proper credit to the source.
Even if you don’t use someone else’s words, but you refer to an idea of concept from another
source, you must also give credit.
‘Citing your sources’ means giving all of the information about your source, such as author, title,
and date of publication, so someone else can find that source again.” (Penn State, 2012)
Use quotes effectively
“If you use someone else’s exact words, you need to put those words in quotation marks.
Changing a few words here and there is not enough to avoid plagiarism. Either put the exact
phrase you are quoting in quotation marks, or rewrite it entirely in your own words.
Quoting extensively from another source, even if you do it properly, is not appropriate for a
research paper. Use quotations to support your arguments or clarify important points, but create
your own argument using your own words.” (Penn State, 2012)
Paraphrase correctly
“In a paraphrase, you rewrite what someone else has said in your own way. Just as you have a
personality that is different from everyone else’s, you as a writer have your own voice and style.
When you write, even when you are paraphrasing, your writing should sound like it came from
you, not from someone else.” (Penn State, 2012)
References:

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Neville, C. (2007). The complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. New York;
Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Penn State. (2012). Plagiarism & You. Online document. Retrieved June 10, 2015, from
https://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/lls/students/using_information.html
What Is Plagiarism? (n.d.) Retrieved June 10, 2015, from
<http://plagiarism.org/citing-sources/whats-a-citation>