1 of 9

Citing and Referencing Sources: �The mechanics of citing and referencing sources

This video is part of a project funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education

DLSH@UL

Regional Writing Centre

2 of 9

Where to begin?

If you are not sure why you are citing and referencing sources, see the first PowerPoint in this series: Reporting the Work of Others. Why Bother?.
If you are unsure how you introduce the work of others in your papers, see the third PowerPoint in this series: Introducing quotes, paraphrases and summaries of others’ work.
Here, we look at the mechanics of citing and referencing sources.
One problem is that different disciplines have conventions that are unique to that discipline or field.

People who study literature are most likely guided by the Modern Language Association (MLA) , which publishes style guides that include not only information about citing and referencing sources, but how to format the papers and even how to think about and behave to protect the integrity of your work and of the association.
Similarly, Psychology students are guided by the American Psychological Association (APA) style manual.
Law students, in Ireland, are guided by an Irish version of the Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA), and our History Department is guided by a style guide based on the Irish History Studies (HIS) Rules for Contributors.

All these, and many more, including Harvard referencing style, have different rules about how to signify that the information you are reporting originates from the work of others.

06.11.19

For most people new to writing in an academic context, citing and referencing is a head-wrecker. You are not alone.

This PowerPoint presentation focuses on the mechanics of doing so. There are two other PowerPoint presentations in this series that focus on other aspects of citing and referencing sources: one on why we do it and another on some of the discipline-specific ways scholarly researchers present the work of others.

If learning the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of citing and referencing were not bad enough, to make matters worse, different disciplines do it differently from other disciplines. There is MLA, APA, CBE, Oscola, IEEE, Harvard on ad infinitum. Some style sheets such as Harvard, the Oxford Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities and Council of Biology Editors (CBE) style are only referencing styles. Others like Modern Language Association, American Psychological Association and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers are not only referencing styles, but dictate formatting choices and set standards of scholarly or professional behaviour around ethical and legal issues such as plagiarism and copy right violations. Harvard is the only style that is not attached to a scholarly or professional association.

For students entering cross-disciplinary fields, citing and referencing offers a lot of reasons for hating life. It is hoped that this presentation provides some ease of entry into the whole concept regardless of which style you are being asked to use.

3 of 9

Some basics

Depending on the style you are subject to, there will be, at least, a citation that is inserted into the body of your essay or report or case study, etc., and a full reference that the citation corresponds to.

That citation could take any number of forms, from superscripted numbers signifying foot- or endnotes to parenthetical insertions of author’s last names and a date of publication.

The full reference includes enough information so that the reader can find the document that includes the information you have reported. (For information about why we want to do that, see Reporting the Work of Others: Why Bother? on the Digital Learning Support Hub on Sulis or on the RWC website under Writing Workshops Across Disciplines, https://ulsites.ul.ie/rwc/interdisciplinary-workshops).

That full reference might be in a list that follows the main body of your text or it could be in footnotes on the pages in which the citation appears or it could be in both.
The references might be alphabetically arranged by author’s last name or the arrangement could correspond to the number that constitutes the citation or the references could be split into groups such as Primary Sources and Secondary Sources, etc., again, depending on the style assigned to you in the assignment brief or guidelines.

What style are you required to use for your course?

06.11.19

It’s best to try to keep this simple. We read a journal article or a book or get some information from some other source that we want to report because it either helps our case or it weakens opposing cases. So one possibility is that we assert something to be true, then we cite a source or several sources that verify the soundness of our assertion. Or maybe we report on the findings of a study, then comment on how those findings support the position we are trying to defend. In either case, the citation is an abbreviated reference to a source, and we install that abbreviated reference, whether it be an author’s last name and date of publication or an abbreviated form of the title or a number in square brackets or a number in superscript, somewhere in a sentence. And that abbreviated reference corresponds to the unabbreviated reference that can be found in a footnote or in a Works Cited page, a References page or a Bibliography at the end of the document.

The citation contains enough information so that it is easy to find the full reference at the end of the essay or report or whatever. There should be no ambiguity about which citation corresponds to which full reference.

The full reference contains enough information that I am able to find the precise source from which you drew your information. I shouldn’t have to guess where the source is. I should be able to retrieve it.

Do not assume that because one teacher in your course requires Harvard, all teachers in your course will require Harvard. People who study languages, for instance, use Harvard when writing papers about linguistic issues, but MLA when writing about literature in that language.

4 of 9

More basics

Again, citations refer to full references.
The source of the information that you report is, in the broadest sense, a text.
So the first question you want to ask yourself is what kind of text am I looking at?
Is it…

A book with a single author, a book with multiple authors, a book with a corporate author, an edited book, a compilation, an e-book, etc.?
An article? A Newspaper article, an article in a popular magazine, in a zine, in a blog, in a professional journal, in an academic journal?
A website? A blog, social media, discussion board, etc.
An Interview? A meeting, a lecture, an excerpt, etc. (published or unpublished?)

If you look at the various styles of citing and referencing sources, most, if not all, organise their instruction around the type of text you are citing as a resource.
When reading, you should pay attention to the kinds of sources that leaders in your field cite and reference. Those are the sources that are valued.

06.11.19

One thing that I learned about this citing and referencing is that all of the various referencing styles organise around ‘text types’. In this way of thinking, everything that communicates is a type of text: audio or video recording, a painting, a book, a zine, the rosetta stone, etc. It is helpful to look at a manual to see how they categorise text types. Cite it Right, for example, categorises text types as Articles, Books, Correspondence, Data, Electronic Communication, Images, Law and Official Publications, Media, Musical Works, Papers, Reports, Technical/Commercial/Industrial, Theses and Translations. And each of these categories have sub-categories. The category Papers, for instance, includes: Case Studies, published Conference Paper, unpublished Conference Paper, Conference Posters, Pre-Print manuscripts, Working Papers and Slideshare Presentations. And for each category, specific information is required in the full reference and that information must be appear in a particular order.

The kinds of ‘text types’ or sources you will draw on for support has to be the kind of resources that people in your field value, so pay attention when reading to the types of sources that people in your discipline use. Do they rely on studies that supply statistical findings and evidence as in sociological or business reports? Or do they rely on the conclusions of critical theorists as in philosophical essays? And how are these reports and essays accessed? In books? In Academic or Trade Journals? You Tube? Where?

5 of 9

Okay, the last of the basics

Once you know what kind of text you are looking at, you can begin to address the following questions:

What information does the citation and the full reference require?
In what order does that information appear?
What kind of punctuation or spacing separates the discrete types of information?

APA:

Full reference for a website:

Last name, F. M. (Year, Month Date). Title of page. Site name. URL

Price, D. (2018, March 23). Laziness does not exist. Medium. https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01

The citation that corresponds to it:

(Author’s last name, year of last update for the page(s), paragraph number)
(Price, 2018, para. 4-6)

Harvard would be similar. (For details, consult Cite It Right, UL library’s style guide for Harvard referencing.)

06.11.19

So three things have to be considered when citing and referencing sources:

The information required by the manual
The order in which that information appears
And the form that each bit of information takes—is it parenthetical? Is it italicised? Is it enclosed by inverted commas? Is the bit of information followed by a comma? A full-stop? A colon? A semi-colon? Etc.

For comparison to the APA citation above, that same source would appear as a full reference in MLA style thusly:
Price, Doris. (2018) “Laziness does not exist.” Medium, Humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01, 2018. Accessed August 18, 2020.
The in-text citation might only include the paragraph numbers, depending on the sentence that introduces the information. If the author is mentioned in the sentence and only one source from that author is included in the Works Cited page, then the paragraph numbers alone would be included in a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence: (par. 4-6). In MLA, par. Instead of para. If there were more than one source, then the parenthetical citation might include an abbreviated title in inverted commas followed by the paragraph numbers: (“Laziness”, par. 4-6).

6 of 9

Citing and referencing sources in disciplines

7 of 9

Learning strategy

Read for content, but also for form.
Pay attention to how sources are introduced, typically. Keep in mind that there are many sub-fields in your field and some of those conventions may not cross over.
Pay attention to citation conventions—where do writers in your field typically place the citation?
Pay attention to how writers comment on the information they report, but with respect to the verbs they use to report the ideas and findings of others and in terms of any commentary that precedes or follows.

8 of 9

That’s all folks!

Some relevant, helpful sites:

Book a session with a peer writing tutor at www.ul.ie/rwc. Our peer tutors are good writers with good habits, processes and strategies that work. They also have a good understanding of the academic context and what your teachers and publishers are looking for, so log in and talk to one of out tutors.

9 of 9

This work was funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education