REFERENCING

Using quotations and proper acknowledgement of sources is an important part of academic

writing.

It strengthens your arguments and shows that you have read widely and know your subject –
you can BACK UP your opinion with FACTS.

It is perfectly acceptable to use other people’s ideas, but you must document your sources, or
you could be accused of plagiarism.

Using ideas and facts from other people, books or web pages without saying where they
come from is stealing those ideas and facts. It is called plagiarism and it is a serious crime.
At any level, if there is no proper referencing, a fail mark will be awarded.

There are two kinds of referencing: quoting INSIDE your essay (in-text referencing) and
writing a bibliography at the end of your essay or assignment.

● Quoting: involves saying what the other person has said, in their exact words.

When you quote, you must use inverted commas or quotation marks (‘or”) for short quotations
and you must indent longer quotations. You must also introduce each quotation, and not simply
plug it into your essay without any explanation. Remember: a quotation cannot form a sentence
on its own. To be a full sentence, it needs some words (preferably a subject and a verb) from
you and in your voice. Here are some examples of how to do it correctly.

At the end of Sula, Nel says, “And all this time I thought I was missing Jude” (Morrison 1973:
32).
Here the reference is set out AUTHOR – DATE OF PUBLICATION – PAGE NUMBER

Freud writes that “being afraid is standard” (1932: 45) for children.
Here the author is mentioned IN the sentence, so the reference only needs the DATE OF
PUBLICATION – PAGE NUMBER
1
Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler describe marriage as follows:

Feminists have defined marriage in several ways, including (but not limited to): (1)
as a women’s trade, (2) as a system of economic exchange, (3) as a system of
legalized rape and/or prostitution, (4) as a union to be entered into for countless
practical, economic, spiritual, legal, political, emotional, or other reasons, not
necessarily between a man and a woman, with many possibilities for form and
structure, (5) as the material appropriation of women. (2012: 252)

Here the quotation is long, so you separate it from the rest of your essay by indenting it on the
left and the right and using less spacing (basically, you put the quotation in a little block all its
own). Because you used the authors’ names already, you only need to mention PUBLICATION
DATE -PAGE NUMBER at the end of the quotation.

UNISA uses the Harvard method of referencing.

In this case, you must give three details. First, give the surname of the author of the text.
Often, though, the author’s surname appears in the sentence where the quotation is given. In
this case, it is not necessary to repeat the surname. Then, give the date of publication of the
text: that is, the year it was published. You then use a colon (:) and give the number of the
page where the quotation appears.

An example of a reference using the Harvard method is: (Smith 1999:204)

This means that the quotation appears on page 204 of a book written by Smith and published
in 1999. The reader can then consult your bibliography and find out which book you read that
was written by Smith and published in 1999 in order to find out what its title is. If your
quotation covers more than one page, you need to give all the page numbers. Say the quote
from Smith begins on page 204 and ends on page 210. In this case, use a hyphen (-) to mean
204 to 210. You would then write: (Smith 1999:204-10)

This means that the quotation comes from pages 204 to 210 in the book by Smith that was
published in 1999.

2
Paraphrasing: indirect quotation

Sometimes you will want to summarize in your own words what somebody else has said on
your subject.

If you were writing an essay on the subject of crime, you might read a book called The Crime
Debate by Paul E. Goodrich. (Note: this book is fictional!) He might argue that crime is a
consequence of poverty, but his argument might be so long that you do not want to put it into
your essay in full. In this case, you could simply write:

Paul E. Goodrich believes that poverty leads to crime.

This is called paraphrasing someone else’s words. But it remains their idea, and you still
need to say where the author makes this claim and you have to give a reference for it,
either directly after the paraphrase or in a footnote, as you do for quotations.

When there are TWO authors:

Join the names with ‘and’ or an ampersand (&): (Smith & Jones 1981:10) or (Smith and Jones
1981:10). The word ‘and’ may be used instead of the ampersand in the text itself (that is, not
in parenthesis). When the name of the author is part of the sentence, it need not be repeated in
the parenthetic source reference:

Jones and Carter (1980:10) maintain that ...

OR

In a work published in 1980, Jones and Carter (p. 10) state that ...

When there are THREEE or more authors

Give the name of the first author and write ‘et al.’ (which means et alii, or ‘and the others’) for
the others: (Smith et al. 1982) Latin expressions such as ‘et al.’ are not underlined or italicized
when they are used in referencing.
3
When you want to refer to TWO DIFFERENT authors or studies

Use semicolons to separate references: (Piaget 1980:12; Smith & Jones 1981:10)

Newspaper reports
If the author of a newspaper article is given, the report (as in the case of a journal article) is
listed in the list of sources under the author's name. The problem with newspaper reports is,
however, that the name of the author and the title of the report are usually not supplied. In such
cases it is easier to identify a specific issue by giving the full name and date of the newspaper
in the text: (Pretoria News, 9 January 1979:7)

Works universally known by their titles

Certain reference works, such as encyclopaedias and dictionaries, are universally known by
their titles. Besides, in the case of encyclopaedias it is not always possible to identify the author
of a specific contribution, although sometimes the names of dozens of collaborators are listed
at the beginning of the volume. It makes things considerably easier for the reader if these works
are listed under their titles.

List of sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1964. London: Benton.

Reference to a source in your text: (EB 1964)
List of sources: Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal, deel I. 1956. Pretoria: Staatsdrukker.
Reference to a source in your text: (WAT 1956)

MANY books by one author

If a particular author (or group of authors) has published several works in the same year, these
works are distinguished from one another in the list of sources by adding a letter of the alphabet
(starting with ‘a’) to the date of publication:

Smith, J.A. 1981a. The ethics of difference. Pretoria: Van Schaik.

Smith, J.A. 1981b. Some themes in African writing. Pretoria: Van Schaik.

4
The date is written in the same way in source references in the text:

(Smith 1981a:12)

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

A bibliography is a list of all the sources that were used to do research for a particular
assignment, including those from which you did not take quotations.

A list of sources, on the other hand, contains only those sources quoted from in the assignment
and from which you paraphrased or translated information.

At the end of an assignment, article or dissertation, you only need to supply a list of sources,
which is also referred to as ‘Works Cited’.

A list of sources (or a bibliography) consists of a single alphabetical and chronological list,
listing both books and journals, because this is the easiest way for your reader to find your
sources. The rule is that you must present your sources in such a way that your reader can find
them easily if she wants to read them.

Alphabetical order is determined by the name of the author or by the title of the work if the
title is used instead of the author's name.

The author's surname precedes his or her initials. This also applies where there is more
than one author:

Smit, A., Jones, B. & Walker, C.

More than one author

List the names of all the authors, with all their initials, in your list of sources. ‘et al.’ Is used in
the text only and not in the list of sources. Use an ampersand (&) before the name of the last
author (see par. 3.1.1).
5
The titles of books and the names of journals are written in italics or underlined. In
contrast, the titles of single contributions to composite works and journal articles are not written
in italics or underlined. They may be placed between inverted commas (see par. 4.2.1 and 4.3)
or not, but this must be done consistently.

Use capitals for the first letters of the names of journals and newspapers. In all other
instances capitalize only the first letter of the main title:

Tydskrif vir Wetenskap en Kuns Writing research papers: a guide for students

Place of publication
If the names of more than one city or town are given, you need only give the first city’s name,
unless the second name is better known than the first:

Edinburgh & London becomes Edinburgh only

but
Putsonderwater & Cape Town is given simply as Cape Town.

Normally it is only necessary to mention the name of the city, for example, London or New
York. Cities in the United States are followed by an abbreviation that stands for the state where
the city is, for example:

Cambridge, MA [Massachusetts]
Englewood Cliffs, NJ [New Jersey]

Internet sources
These are cited in your bibliography according to the author’s name, or, if there is no author
given, alphabetically by the first word in the title. The date given must be the date on which
you consulted that URL, not the date on which it first appeared on the Internet.
The date appears in brackets after the URL and it must be complete.

6
EXAMPLES:

Blakeman, K. 2006. Search Strategies for the internet. Caversham: RBA.

[Link] [Accessed 6 August 2006]

White, M. 2005. Communities of Practice: sources of information. Horsham: Intranet Focus

Ltd.
[Link] [Accessed 6 August 2006]

Individual works with no person named as Author

AOL Time Warner. 2001. 2000 Annual Report. New York: AOL Time Warner.
[Link] [Accessed 6
September 2001]

Public Record Office. 2001. Managing web resources. Kew: Public Record Office.
[Link]
[Accessed 6 August 2006]

Articles with no personal Author given

Economist. 2001. "Japan rolls out 3G phones." Economist, 3 September.

[Link] [Accessed 6 September 2001]
Statesman (India). 2000. "The future of internet ventures in India". Statesman (India), 8
October. Dialog Information Service, File 20 World Reporter. [Accessed 15 November 2000].
Conference Papers

Feria, L. 2000. "ICT and marketing challenges in Latin American Libraries”. In: IFLA 2000
Jerusalem. Proceedings of the 66th IFLA Council and General Conference. 13-18 August
2000, Jerusalem, Israel. The Hague: International Federation of Library Associations and
Institutions. [Link] [Accessed 21 August 2000].

7
Kindle Referencing

This is cited in the same manner as you would for a book, so you would have author’s name,
date, title, publisher and place of publication. Thereafter instead of providing page numbers
you would say: Kindle Location (60%)

e-Book

This is cited in the same manner as you would for a book, so you would have author’s name,
date, title, publisher and place of publication. Thereafter you would provide the page numbers.