Referencing conventions

Stylistic conventions vary between subjects. You should consult your Course Director or Supervisor if you are unsure which are used in your Faculty or Department. Most Departments issue written guidance on the relevant scholarly conventions and you should read and follow this advice. However, the main points are:

• when presenting the views and work of others, you must give an indication of the source of the material
  conventions for this vary, but one approach would be to write: '... as Sharpe (1993) has shown', and give the full details of the work quoted in your bibliography
• if you quote text verbatim, make this completely evident
  again conventions will vary but you might say: 'The elk is of necessity less graceful than the gazelle' (Thompson, 1942, p. 46) and give the full details in your bibliography as above
• if you wish to set out the work of another at length so that you can produce a counter-argument, set the quoted text apart from your own text (e.g. by indenting a paragraph) and identify it in a suitable way (e.g. by using inverted commas and adding a reference as above)
  NB long quotations may infringe copyright, which exists for the life of the author plus 70 years
• if you are copying text, keep a note of the author and the reference as you go along, with the copied text, so that you will not mistakenly think the material to be your own work when you come back to it in a few weeks' time
• if you reproduce an illustration or include someone else's data in a graph or table, include the reference to the original work in the legend, e.g. '(figure redrawn from Webb, 1976)' or '(1 = data from Webb, 1976).

Cambridge Online Study Skills has a useful interactive section about referencing and bibliographies which you may find helpful:

• COSS: referencing and bibliographies

Examples of referencing conventions

A selection of referencing conventions is listed below with links to resources which give further information about following the style. As above, always use the convention which is favoured by your faculty or department

• APA (American Psychological Association)
  Citation technique usually used in the Social Sciences
  Tutorial from the University of Cardiff
• Chicago
  Style guide for typographical and citation techniques often used by academic publishers
• Harvard
  The most commonly used style of referencing; used widely in academic journals
  Guidance from Cambridge Online Study Skills
• IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
  Referencing guidelines used in the fields of Engineering and Technology
• MLA (Modern Language Association)
  Style guide used particularly in academic writing for languages and literature
• MRHA (Modern Humanities Research Association)
  Style guide used for academic theses and essays in the Humanities
• OSCOLA (Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities)
  Citation guidelines for legal materials
• Vancouver
  Style of referencing using a numerical system - often used in medical writing
  Guidance from the University of Leicester