Referencing Guide
Referencing
The AsanSka Univeersity College of Design uses the American Psychological Association Referencing Style(APA). You will find more information on the APA style of referencing below.
About APA Style
APA Style provides a foundation for effective scholarly communication because it helps writers present their ideas in a clear, precise, and inclusive manner.
Why is APA Style needed?
Uniformity and consistency enable readers to focus on the ideas being presented rather than formatting and scan works quickly for key points, findings, and sources.
Style guidelines encourage authors to fully disclose essential information and allow readers to dispense with minor distractions, such as inconsistencies or omissions in punctuation, capitalization, in-text citations, references, and presentation of statistics.
When style works best, ideas flow logically, sources are credited appropriately, and papers are organized predictably and consistently. People are described using language that affirms their worth and dignity. Authors plan for ethical compliance and report critical details of their research protocol to allow readers to evaluate findings and other researchers to potentially replicate the studies. Tables and figures present data in an engaging, consistent manner.
Whether you use APA Style for a single class or throughout your career, we encourage you to recognize the benefits of a conscientious approach to writing.
Although the guidelines span many areas and take time and practice to learn, we hope that they provide a balance of directiveness and flexibility and will eventually become second nature.
Referencing Help
The five basic principles of referencing
The basic principles of referencing are:
- Clearly identify the material being cited: include sufficient information.
- How specific do you need to be?: do you need to refer to the entire document or to a specific part of a document? This will depend on the purposes of the citation and the use that you make of the material being cited.
- Take the information from the resource being cited.
- Make sure the information in the reference reflects the specific copy or instance of the document that was used. For online documents that are subject to change, such data includes the uniform resource locator (URL) of the particular version that was used and the date on which the document was accessed.
- Be consistent: use a uniform style, format and punctuation scheme for all references in a document, regardless of the particular style guide being used. If you are inconsistent, vary styles in the same assignment or you do not provide sufficient information to identify the resource, you are likely to lose marks.
When you proof read your assignment, check for errors in punctuation, check that all elements of the reference are included and check that all the cited works appear in your references list.
The data you use should be taken from the resource itself. The preferred source of data for the reference is the title page or equivalent, such as the title screen, home page, disc label or map face. Any information that does not appear in the cited information resource, but is supplied by the citer, should be enclosed in square brackets.
These guidelines are taken from the international standard BS ISO 690: 2010.
Who can help me with referencing?
The Librarian is always ready and happy to offer general advice with using this guide
Why Reference?
Referencing is an essential part of academic scholarship and ethical values demand that authors identify the sources used in their work. To do this, you will:
- Mention sources, paraphrase ideas, or directly quote sources within your work (in-text citation);
- Create a full list of sources at the end of your work (reference list).
Plagiarism is considered as unethical in academia and is treated as misconduct by the AUCDT.
You are referencing in order to:
- Show anyone who reads your work your ability to select and refer to the most appropriate external sources which support your work.
- Support specific facts or claims which you make in your work.
- Enable the reader to locate where you obtained each quote or idea.
The benefits of referencing to you are that:
- It shows the range of reading that you have done. This is likely to gain you marks.
- It can make your own arguments more convincing by supporting them with the ideas of acknowledged experts and data from credible sources.
- It is a basic academic requirement and doing so means you cannot be accused of plagiarism.
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