For all academic assignments it is vital that you acknowledge the sources of information you have used for your research. This will help you protect yourself against charges of plagiarism and also demonstrate that you understand the importance of professional academic work.
You must acknowledge your sources whenever you paraphrase or summarise another person's ideas or points, or when you quote another person's work, or use tables, graphs, images, etc. which you have found from another source, be it from a printed document or from the web. This guide explains how this is done in the Harvard Style, sometimes called the author-date system.
There are two simple steps to acknowledging your sources: citing your references in the text, to show where you have drawn upon other people's work, and then listing them at the end of your work under the heading 'References'. Sometimes this is called a bibliography.
Citing your sources in the text
W hen you refer to another’s words or ideas in your work, you must cite your source. At an appropriate point in your text, provide the author’s surname and the year of publication in round brackets.
Alternatively, if you include the author’s name in your sentence, only provide the year of publication in brackets: It has been argued (Harris 2001) that the main considerations are…
It has been argued by Harris (2001) that the main considerations are…
For edited books that contain collections of chapters written by different authors, cite the author of the chapter and not the editor of the overall book.
If you are citing different publications written by the same author in the same year, label the first one cited with the letter ‘a’ after the year and the second ‘b’ etc. e.g. (Smith 2004a), (Smith
2004b). You will need to do the same in your list of references.
W here two authors have produced the work, include both their last names in your citation e.g.
(Cullingworth and Nadin 2007) or Cullingworth and Nadin (2007).
W hen there are three or more authors use the abbreviation et al. (and others) after the first author’s surname e.g. Tayler et al. (2003) or (Tayler et al. 2003).
If you are discussing a point about which several authors have expressed similar views, include them all in one set of brackets in chronological order of publication. List any works published in the same year in alphabetical order e.g. (Midgley 1994; Smith 1994; UNCHS 1996; Gandelsonas 2002).
Paraphrasing your sources
The examples above cover instances where you are summarising the overall argument or position of a book or an article. If you are paraphrasing a particular argument or point from your source you must include page numbers:
It has been argued (Harris 2001, pp. 20-21) that the main considerations are the scope of the project, the cost and the duration of the work.
Directly quoting from your sources
You should aim to paraphrase information provided by an author in your own words rather than quote large amounts of their work verbatim as this helps to demonstrate to the reader your understanding of the information. It can be necessary to quote directly from the text when you:
Cannot present the information more succinctly or in any other way.
Need to present a particular portion of an author’s text in your work to analyse it.
If the quotation is short, enclose the writer’s words in double quotation marks and then cite the author, date and page number:
Key causes of economic deprivation include low income or unemploymen t which are often the result of “poor qualification levels and lack of basic skills” (Thake and Saubach 1993, p.
18).
Longer quotations should be separated from the body of your text and indented from the left -hand margin. W hen you indent a quotation, there is no need to include quotation marks:
As Joia and Sanz (2005, p. 5) observe:
In specific terms, it might be