Learning Skills Letter: Citation and Referencing

To: MIB students

From: John Small, Learning Skills Adviser
Date: Friday, 1 August 2016

I hope and trust that you were able to access the tutorial on citation and referencing that I directed you to in
my last letter. If not, please do so. The address is: http://monash.edu/library/skills/resources/tutorials/citing.

CITATION AND REFERENCING

Why is it so important? As I pointed out last week, you and I are not allowed to use thoughts that have been
developed and expressed by others without making proper acknowledgement. Correct citation and referencing
is a nod, a gesture of respect, to those amazing people who have studied and researched the subject area in
which you are studying. You are acknowledging your indebtedness to them, since without their contributions
your knowledge would have been sketchy, and your own written work much the poorer.

What is a citation? What is a reference? A citation is a pair of round brackets containing the surname and
the year; that is, the surname(s) of the author(s) of the work that you studied and that you are using to form
the thought you are expressing, and the year the work was published. A citation occurs intext; that is, in the
main body of your essay or report. It may occur near the beginning of a sentence, or right at the end. This may
come as a surprise to you, but citations are likely to be required in nearly every sentence you write. Every
sentence that does not contain a citation is your claim that the idea being expressed is your own.

A reference is an entry made in the list of References at the end of your essay or report. It provides details
that will allow the reader to consult and double-check your sources. The reference provides the surname and
initials of the author(s), the year of publication, the full title of the article, the full title of the publication in
which the article appeared, and the place where that publication was published. It is a complete specification
of the source you used, enabling a librarian to access the very paper you have studied.

It is very important that your citations and your references should match each other. Every citation in your text
must have a corresponding reference entered in your list of References. It is poor form to have a citation
present in your text, and yet there is no such author mentioned in the References list a very careless
mistake indeed!

Do citations cramp your style? Do they interrupt the flow of your prose? Yes, they do! But that is a key
difference between academic writing and the writing of an ordinary essay, short story or prose. In academic
writing it is customary for every paragraph to contain numerous citations. The Q Manual states that every
sentence that has no citation is your claim that you are expressing your own view, drawing your own
conclusion, stating your own opinion a claim that you are speaking with your own voice and that you are not
presenting the viewpoint of another author in doing so. Citations may not look pretty from the standpoint of
producing smoothly flowing prose, but they are beautiful in the eyes of your lecturer when he or she assesses a
piece of academic writing. For more on this, please consult Chapter 10 of your Q Manual. Any essay or report
that has no citations and no list of references is not a piece of academic writing at all!