In my last blog post, we looked at how to cite your sources in a reference list. In this blog post, we will instead be considering the correct format for citations in the main text of your work. There are a few different ways to do this, so we will be looking at these, as well as how to deal with sources that have multiple authors or are one part of an edited book. However, we will start by asking why referencing is such an important part of academic writing.
There are two main reasons to ensure you correctly reference your work. Firstly, it means that you will not be committing plagiarism. Everyone, including you, has the right to acknowledged as the creator of their own work. Plagiarism happens when you use someone else’s work in your writing without crediting it, presenting it as your own ideas. Remember that plagiarism is not always as simple as copying a source exactly; it can also happen if you just rewrite it without adding anything substantial.
Plagiarism is primarily an ethics issue and is taken very seriously by universities and institutions. If it is confirmed that your work is the product of plagiarism, the consequences will depend on specific policy and the details of the incident. You might be required to redo the parts affected or the whole assignment. For repeated or particularly serious cases, you might have to redo the module or possibly even leave your course.
The other reason to reference is that it benefits your readers. If they are reading your work and want to know more about a specific point you have made, good in-text citations and a reference list will help them to quickly find the relevant source. Likewise, if you refer to a particular source, it helps your readers if they look this up for themselves so they can read your work with this additional context.
Making In-Text Citations
In general, all in-text citations should include the creator’s name and the year. There are two different ways of including a citation in the main body of your work – direct and indirect. You will likely use both of these in your writing.
A direct citation mentions the name of your source directly in the text as part of the sentence that refers to it. For example:
Careful architecture can help to reduce much of the damage caused by earthquakes, as is explained in Ganeri (2000).
Alternatively, you can make an indirect reference to a source by having both the creator’s name and the year in brackets, separated by a comma. For example:
Different places may use different scales (Ganeri, 2000) to measure an earthquake’s severity, creating problems for direct comparisons.
Both of these methods are fine to use, so pick whichever one fits best with the flow of your text.
Multiple Creators
Where a source has more than one creator, you will need to list them all in your reference list. However, this is a lot less practical in the main text of your work, as you could theoretically have a paragraph that is mostly names, especially if you have more than one citation in it! To avoid this, the number of creator names you can have in the text is capped at three. There are different ways of dealing with this according to the total number of creators.
If there are two or three creators, it’s simple – you can just list them all, separated by a comma or an “and”. For example:
Research carried out (Pike, Norman and Speaks, 2009) shows that…
However, if there are four or more creators of a single source, just give the first one, followed by the phrase “et al.”, without the quotes. This literally means “and others” and indicates that there are multiple creators of this source, which will be given in full in the reference list. For example:
A study by Pike, at al. (2014) found that…
Additional Considerations
There are a few other scenarios that might come up when you are writing. For example, a contributed chapter in an edited book should be cited by the chapter author’s name, not the editor’s name, as the chapter author is the one that actually created the work. So, a chapter by Sharma in a book edited by McNish would be written in text as:
Sharma (2009) explains that…
If you are referencing a specific part of a book or journal, it is a good idea to include page numbers to help your readers pinpoint the exact paragraph. These come after the year in the citation, with p. indicating a single page and pp. a range of pages. For example:
Baker (2006, p.83) states that…
If you are including a quote in your writing, place it in quote marks, “……”, and make sure you include the page numbers in your citation, as above.
Wrapping Up
I hope that this helps you to use in-text citations in your work. In my next blog post, we will be looking at how to organise your reference list, so come back in two weeks for that!
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