When you start university, there are a few things you’ll need to get the hang of, and referencing is definitely one of them. It’s especially important if you’re studying a humanities subject or have lots of assignments and reports to complete.
Referencing is very simply how you acknowledge where you’ve gotten your information or a quote from. It’s absolutely crucial in academic writing for various reasons that we’ll break down later on in the article. For more information on referencing, check out this article from Newcastle University.
This article will go through everything you need to know about referencing — why it’s important, how to do it, and even the different referencing styles you might come across.
Table of Contents
Why is referencing important?
Referencing is crucial at university. This is for several reasons, such as the following:
- It allows you to avoid plagiarism: Plagiarism is where you take someone else’s ideas and use them in your work without giving acknowledgement. Getting flagged for plagiarism can lead to serious consequences. By acknowledging your research sources, you are automatically avoiding plagiarism. For more information on plagiarism, look at this article from the University of Oxford.
- Increases the credibility of your arguments: By referencing to lead researchers in your field, your points become part of something bigger than your ideas. It allows you to evaluate your ideas based on pre-existing research.
- Allows people to check where your sources are from: In academic writing, readers may want to do some further research of their own; referencing allows them to read the entirety of your sources, not just the parts you’ve highlighted.
- Shows that you have done sufficient research: More than just showing where your research is from, it also shows how much research you’ve done, which can also make your argument look better supported and fully scoped.
- Allows you to get better marks: For me, at university, for certain assignments, there is a minimum number of references that we have to include. While this is mostly a guideline, it’s because referencing enough limits how well you can perform.
How do you reference?
There are a few different forms of referencing, and how these can appear is slightly different, even in the same style. There are three main types of referencing:
- In-text citations
- Reference list
- Bibliography
1. In-text citations are exactly as they sound. They are citations or references made throughout the text itself.
These citations are usually shortened and include key details like the author’s name, year of publication, or page number. In some cases, they may just show a number that connects to a footnote or a full reference at the end of the text.
For example, if you were referencing ‘Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar’ by Bruce Donaldson in the APA style, this would be:
- (Donaldson, 2008, p. 73)
2. A reference list may also be known as end-text citations. This is because a reference list is at the end of your writing and is a list of all the citations made throughout the text but in full form.
These references include the full name of the author, title, year of publication, place of publication, publisher and page number(s) or chapter number. The order of these will depend on the referencing style.
For example, for the same book as before, it would be:
- Donaldson, B. (2008). Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, in the APA style.
- Donaldson, Bruce. Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar. Taylor & Francis, 2008, in the MLA style.
3. Bibliographies are very similar to reference lists to the extent that sometimes they are used interchangeably. However, they are not the same thing.
While a reference list details the citations made throughout the text, a bibliography references all sources you’ve used, even if you didn’t cite them within the text. This will generally be for things like factual information that you don’t cite but still need to reference in the bibliography if you learnt about it while researching.
You can find out more about how they differ by checking out this article by Scribbr.
Although different, the way that you reference lists and bibliographies is the same. You can learn more about how to reference in this article by Newcastle University.
To help you make references, you can use websites, such as Google Books, as I did to create this one. Also, you can see that explains the formats of referencing.
You can also look at reference generators, such as the following, that can do referencing for you:
How do you reference websites?
Referencing a website is largely the same as referencing a book, research paper, or other sources that you use. However, there are some differences.
First, when referencing websites, you will need to state when you looked at the website. This is in addition to the other details, even the publication date.
Another addition is that you will need to put the full URL into the reference.
Also, due to the nature of the website, you may struggle to find certain information, such as the date or the author. However, no need to worry as there are pretty simple fixes for this:
- No date: If there’s no date on the webpage or online resources, you can simply write the abbreviation “n.d.”
- No author: If there’s no named author, you can use the name of the website instead.
For example, if I was referencing the Think Student article, ‘How to Write a Dissertation- A Student’s Guide’, it would look like this in the Harvard style:
- Think Student Editor (2023). How to Write a Dissertation – A Students Guide – Think Student. [online] Think Student. Available at: https://thinkstudent.co.uk/how-to-write-a-dissertation-a-students-guide/ [Accessed 5 Dec. 2024].
You can learn more about referencing for websites by checking out this page on the UNSW Sydney website.
What are the different referencing styles you can have?
In this article, we’ve already talked quite a lot about different referencing styles, such as Harvard. In this section, we’re going to go through what this means and what all the different ones you can use are.
A referencing style is an approach or style to referencing that dictates the format and the order in which you reference. There are many different styles to the extent that they can be broken down into categories.
There are referencing style categories or systems, such as:
- Author-date
- Numerical
- Notes and bibliography
Within these systems, many different referencing styles dictate various formats. Some of the main referencing styles are as follows:
- APA – Author-date.
- MLA – Author-date.
- Harvard – Author-date.
- Chicago – Notes and bibliography.
- Vancouver – Numeric.
- MHRA – Notes and bibliography.
- OSCOLA – Notes and bibliography.
You can learn more about these referencing styles by looking at this page on the UCL website.
With so many different referencing styles, it’s easy to get confused about which one to use. The style you should follow usually depends on your university or sometimes even on the specific department your course belongs to.
If they don’t specify, just make sure to use the same referencing style consistently throughout your paper. It can also be helpful to pick one style you’re comfortable with and stick with it for all assignments.
When should you reference it?
You’ll need to reference whenever you refer to a text. This includes direct quotes, paraphrasing, or even just mentioning ideas—whether directly or indirectly.
For more on this, have a look at this page by the University of Reading.
You’ll also need to reference specific details you’ve used from a source, like data, statistics, or specific facts. Even if you don’t include an in-text citation, any information or texts that helped come up with your arguments should still be listed in your bibliography.
The lines can seem rather blurred about what kinds of specific information you will need to reference. If it is ‘common knowledge’, you won’t need to reference it.
Common knowledge refers to information that meets the following criteria:
- Information that is widely accessible and in numerous sources.
- Information that is likely to be known by lots of people.
- Information that can be found in reference resources, such as an encyclopaedia or a dictionary.
You can learn more about this by checking out this page by the University of Cambridge.
How many references should you use?
Now that we’ve looked at the how, when and why, let’s delve deeper into what you need to know when you’re writing. One of the main things you need to know is how many references you should include. This is about more than just avoiding plagiarism but also about how much reading you should be doing for your assignment.
The number of references you should include depends on a few factors. These include:
- The length of your assignment: As a rule of thumb, it can be a good idea to use one source for every 150 or so words. This would mean about 10 for a 1,500-word essay and about 13 for a 2,000-word essay. For more on this, have a look at this article by Custom Writings.
- How many points you need to make: If you don’t want to focus only on word count, you can look at how many points and arguments you need to be making. Try to then include between 1 and 3 sources for each of these to make sure that each argument is fully supported. For more on this, have a look at this article by Oxbridge Essays.
- How much research you need to do: If you have a highly research-based assignment, you’re naturally going to need to have more sources, especially in comparison to more theoretical subjects, which won’t need as many.
- The assignment requirements: You may also get guidelines to tell you how many sources you should be including, it’s important that you stick to this, as it is likely to affect your marks.
Are references included in the word count?
Whether references are included in the word count will depend on your university’s policies. However, in general, policies tend to be very similar across universities.
Generally, references that are a part of the text will be included in the word count, whereas completely separate ones won’t.
In this case, in-text citations are normally included, whereas reference lists and bibliographies aren’t. Find out more about references and word counts by checking out this page on the Leeds Becket University website.
When it comes to footnotes, there is a lot more variation, so it is crucial to check your university’s policies. Some universities consider footnotes a part of the text and so include them in the word count.
However, other universities, such as the University of Birmingham, exclude footnotes, as well as diagrams or tables, as part of the main word count, even though they appear in the text. For more on these policies, have a look at this page on the University of Birmingham’s website.