Young High School

Growth, Resilience, Empathy, Acceptance, Teamwork

Telephone02 6382 1166

Emailyoung-h.school@det.nsw.edu.au

Referencing

Referencing accurately. It's critical

Citation makers and referencing

Young High School uses the Harvard system of citation (also called the author/date system), which is mandatory in most local universities, TAFE and other training colleges. 

The school teacher-librarian is able to assist students to compile bibliographies, in-text referencing and footnotes. Ensuring that you reference your work correctly is now a critical element of your research and learning. The following sites can help to generate a bibliography when resource details are inserted. For more information on where to find the information and how to insert the details, consult with the teacher-librarian.

Why must I cite my sources?

  • I cannot claim the work or ideas of someone else as my own
  • Plagiarism is not just when I directly copy words from someone else's work. Plagiarism is also when someone else's work is paraphrased or their ideas are used and claimed as my own
  • Referencing has a positive effect and adds credibility to my work
  • When I reference correctly, I am demonstrating that (a) I have read widely on the topic and (b) that I am supporting my hypotheses with comments from expert authors and/or reliable sources
  • Correct referencing allows the marker/reader to follow-up my references and check the validity of my arguments for themselves.

Bibliography generators

A bibliography generator can be helpful in accurately pulling together your sources. Some useful bibliography generators include:

Citing material from the internet/websites

When citing web sites or pages which may change it's important to make a note of the date you accessed the page or retrieved information from the page, and also note the URL of the page.

Websites can sometimes be difficult to cite as you might have to draw information from different areas of the webpage or website to put into your citation. Some information, like authorship or publication date can be hard to find or identify. The brief video tutorial will give you some useful tips on where to look for information to make your citation as complete as possible.

Basic format for citing a book or e-Book

Author(s) family name, initial(s) Year of publication, Title, Publisher, Place of publication.

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