Importance of Academic Referencing and CitingThis blog discusses the importance of academic referencing and citing. To give you an opportunity to practice proofreading, we have left a few spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors in the text. See if you can spot them! If you spot the errors correctly, you will be entitled to a 10% discount.
Whenever you use words, facts, ideas, or explanations from other works, those sources must be cited. Academic referencing is required when you have copied texts from an essay, an article, a book, or other sources verbatim, which is called quotation. You also need referencing when you use an idea or a fact from another work even if you haven’t used their exact expression. The only exception to this rule is when the information is considered common knowledge, which is something that anyone probably knows. If you are unsure whether to reference something or not, then you better reference it. Furthermore, academic referencing enables your target readers to follow up on the original source if they want to. It also allows them to see how dated the information might be. Academic referencing validates and strengthens your arguments.
Failure to provide appropriate acknowledgment of your use of another’s study creates , and it is considered the dead sentence in academia. Copying texts or ideas without academic referencing, with incorrect referencing, and without referring to someone else’s sentence structure even if you change words are the most common examples of plagiarism. Doctoral or other academic degrees can be canceled due to plagiarism. Because plagiarism is a form of cheating, theft, and misappropriation of academic works, such as manuscripts, books, or essays, plagiarism is considered a criminal offense by The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) Thus, it would be safe to say that plagiarism is an act of fraud because it means stealing someone else’s ideas. Do not forget that plagiarism is considered an act of fraud.
Academic referencing requires a formal system. Authors must follow the rules and standards when formatting citations and references. Although most researchers find referencing quite daunting at first, there is no need to worry; it takes time and patience to learn. Different colleges, journals, and institutions may require distinct styles, such as Now, we are going to give some examples of the styles briefly.
The APA (American Psychological Association) style was created by The American Psychological Association. It is one of the widely used academic referencing styles in the sciences and social sciences. APA adopts the author-date system. In-text citations consist mainly of the author’s last name and the year of publication placed within the text, e.g., (Adam, 2008). In in-text citations, the last name of the author is followed by a comma and the publication year enclosed in parentheses. If a citation is directly quoted, you must add the necessary page number as well, e.g., (Adam, 2008, p.26).
The Chicago style was created by The University of Chicago and it is also called the Turabian style. It has two maindocumentation systems: notes-bibliography and author-date. The notes-bibliography system is preferred mainly by humanities. However, the author-date system is used by those in the physical, natural, and social sciences.
- bibliography system of the Chicago style consists of two parts: a number in the text and as either a footnote or an endnote. A footnote requires a note at the bottom of the page, while an endnote requires a note at the end of the paper. Notes are supposed to be numbered sequentially beginning with 1 throughout each article, chapter, or paper.
- date system of the Chicago style consists of the author’s last name and the year of publication of the studycited. No punctuation is required between the author’s name and the date.
The reference list of the Chicago style should be ordered alphabetically by the last name of the first author of each study cited.
consists of the last name of the author(s) and page number in parentheses and placed within the text. The in-text citation of the MLA style The reference list in the MLA style must be ordered alphabetically by the last name of the first author of each publication.
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For more information about the citation styles and APA style, read the following articles:
Originally published at https://besteditproof.com on November 19, 2020.
