What is Referencing?
Referencing acknowledges the books, articles, websites, and any other material used in the writing of a paper, essay or thesis.
A Referencing Style is a set of rules telling you how to do this in a particular way. There are a variety of different styles. It is important to acknowledge the source of your ideas to avoid plagiarism. Anything that is not common knowledge must be cited.
Reference Management Tool: Mendeley
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Mendeley
Mendeley is a citation management tool that, like many others, lets you collect & organize citations, & then easily insert them into documents & format bibliographies. But it also lets you drag & drop PDFs into your library & extracts the metadata to create a library!
You can highlight and annotate your PDFs and share them with others. Colleagues can then also annotate the same document, with each author displaying as a different colour.
Use more than one computer? It's not a problem! Download Mendeley Desktop to as many computers as you want, then sync them with a click of your mouse. Need to use your library away from your computer? Mendeley Web gives you access to your citations no matter where you are.
Mendeley is social: create a profile, follow other researchers, create a network of people doing similar research. Discover the articles and journals that are being read in your field right now.
Create collections of papers. Make them public & share them with an RSS feed (great for class reading lists!).
Reference Management Tool: Zotero
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Zotero
Zotero is a free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials (such as PDF files). Notable features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It is produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
SPU Referencing guide
Example of citation and referencing
A citation is a way of giving credit to individuals for their creative and intellectual works that you utilized to support your research. It can also be used to locate particular sources and combat plagiarism. Typically, a citation can include the author's name, date, location of the publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
A citation style dictates the information necessary for a citation and how the information is ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting.
Example of an Author's name in the text: "Given that mixed methods research is still evolving, we believe that it is essential to keep the discussion open about the definition of mixed methods" ( Tashakori & Creswell 2007:3).
According to Tashakkori and Creswell (2007:3) "Given that mixed methods research is still evolving, we believe that it is essential to keep the discussion open about the definition of mixed methods".
reference example after one has completed the essay:
Journal online : Tashakkori, A. and Creswell, J.W., (2007). The new era of mixed methods. Journal of mixed methods research, 1(1), pp.3-7.