A crucial feature of all academic writing is the use of references and quotations. It is essential that you use them; it is essential that you use them correctly. Quotations and references are used to give credibility to your writing - they are your evidence for the points you are making.

There are three aspects to correct quoting and referencing:

• how to write a quote
• how to reference sources of ideas and quotes
• how to structure items in the reference and bibliography sections

Quotes form an essential part of most academic writing and how you present them is important. Quotes should stand out from your text, but verify it, i.e. your quote should be there to make or support a point.

• Twenty words or less can be incorporated in the body of your text, in which case they need quotation marks round them.
• Quotes of more than twenty or so words should be indented. There is no need to put quotation marks around an indented quote.
• Quotes should be as short as possible and easy to read. If you want to leave bits out, put '...' to show that you have. If you need to add a word or two for it make sense, then put them in square brackets [ ]. For example:

  Jones (1993) feels that "this debate [on politics] needs more discussion ... in the institution", although other authors (for example Smith 1998) disagree.

In the text, just after the quote, give in brackets: author's last name, date of publication, and, if possible, the page number. For example:

Similarly, when you mention a source of information you must reference it correctly, with author's name and date in brackets at the end of the sentence. This is needed even if you didn't quote from it. For example:

To get your sentence to read correctly you can refer to the author in the sentence itself. For example:

If you have read four books which all say the same thing, you can refer to them collectively. For example:

Sometimes you might want to repeat a quote extracted by someone else. This can be indicated as

and with both authors' works listed in the reference list.

References are needed for all material which you have directly referred to or quoted from in your report. They should be listed, in the Reference section, in alphabetical order of author's last name.

A Bibliography is the list of background material you have read or referred to for your work, but may not have used directly in your report. Some lecturers are happy for you to list the referenced and background material together in a Bibliography, some want them as separate sections, some don't want the background references at all. If in doubt, ask.

There are several standard styles of referencing. However the style shown below, based on BS1629 (1989), gives precise rules as to how you should write references both in terms of the items of information which should be provided and in the order and way in which they are written.

• Books: Author's last name, initial(s) or first name(s), (ed) if he/she is the editor rather than the author, date of publication, title of book, place of publication (optional), name of publisher, edition number.

• Journal articles: Author's last name, initial(s) or first name(s), date of publication, title of article, title of journal, details of journal, month, volume, part, pages, etc:

• More than one author

1. If there is between one and three authors, cite them all as they appear on the book or article. For example:

Coe, N. Ryecroft, R. and Ernest, P.

2. If there are more than three, cite the first one and then use 'et al.' (meaning 'and others'). For example:

• Internet URLs

Plagiarism is the act of using other people's words as if they were your own. It is an attempt to gain an unfair advantage and is therefore one form of cheating. It is a very serious academic offence since it is a violation of the objectives of a university education.

If you make a point, without saying where you got that idea from then the reader will assume that you created this idea. If however this is not the case then you have plagiarised it; you have stolen the idea and presented it as though it were your own. This is cheating.

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