Getting used to referencing

One thing that's different on this access course to when I did my A levels 11 years ago is that you now have to reference everything. Back then I only had to do a bibliography at the end of an assignment, but this takes a bit of getting used to doesn't it? Any tips on this?

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One thing that's different on this access course to when I did my A levels 11 years ago is that you now have to reference everything. Back then I only had to do a bibliography at the end of an assignment, but this takes a bit of getting used to doesn't it? Any tips on this?

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That's the problem with using lecture notes to write from - they aren't a primary source. They also won't contain everything you need to answer a question.

In order to write assignments, the idea is that you go away and read books/journals to put your answer together. That way, you gather the references as you go along.

I was gobsmacked when I found out that some of my colleagues were writing an essay and then trying to reference it afterwards. It must take hours. And beware that you'll be expected to use more and more referenced sources as you progress. If you start working the other way round (read then write, as opposed to write then read), the referencing will be much easier and you'll have a much better piece of work.

So you reference inline as you write?

This seems a much smarter way to do things, but what about when you're just writing and can't recall where you got that bit of info from?

I've just done an essay with 40 odd sources, and now have to add the references images and charts :/

Yep. I make rough notes first as I read, and make sure that these contain all of the info I need to reference when I write the assignment later.


I wouldn't use anything that I couldn't reference. If I couldn't remember where it came from, there's a risk that it was just something I heard on the news, in a documentary, in a lecture or from the papers, which usually aren't referenceable sources (unless that's what your assignment asks for). You can draw your own conclusions in the final section of the work, but I made a point of never using anything in the main body of an assignment, that I couldn't reference.

If you find yourself in that situation and you're desperate to use the info, it's worth emailing the person who set the assignment and asking them to point you in the right (referencable) direction for the source. If nothing else it shows enthusiasm and that's the sort of thing which comes in handy when a member of staff is writing a job or academic reference for you.


Ouch - I feel your pain. Whilst I got the hang of referencing in the end, I never found an easy way to deal with graphics and the document formatting around them. That was always a tedious slog.

A lot of it is just common sense stuff thoigh , if I'm talking about sovereign debt theory for example its surely a well established concept that doesn't need referenced?

Similarly for my own formulas/models and stufg , how would I reference those? (History 1st year BTW) Do you usually inline chart and image or lump it all at the end? And do you need to reference images, and if so how do you do so? (Chicago)

Finally if I'm describing say traditional historiography, its more a description of research directions than specific info. How would I reference that ?

Yep, sorry, even "everyone knows that" stuff has to be referenced. If you don't reference a statement that you make in your work, it's a tacit claim that you thought of it first which would be plagiarism in your example.

Somebody else must originally have come up with Sovreign Debt Theory - you need to find out who and quote their work, or quote an academic source which explains it. So to introduce it, you could use something from "Sovreign Debt: from Safety to Default" edited by Robert W Kolb (2011). And to give some recent critique of it, you could try "Rethinking Sovreign Debt" by Odette Lienau (2014).

Even if you say something completely non-contentious and self-evident like "It's usually colder in winter in the UK", you'll be expected to be citing something like a Met Office website!


You need to reference the sources from which you're taking the information on which you're basing your formulas/models.You need to do it for each chart/image. You're not thinking up the data, you're just finding an original way of presenting it. If you're inserting a scanned image, then that can be referenced in the same way as a text statement.

For one of my undergrad assignments, I drew up a graph showing how expenditure by an organisation had increased since 1960. The graph was mine (I couldn't find anyone who'd looked at it in a single one before), but I took the stats from six different sources, each of which had to be referenced in the assignment (short in-text format beneath the graph, with full bibliography entries at the end).


Again, if you're talking about the generic concept of historiography, you can quote from an introductory text which explains it. Something like "Historiography: An Introduction" (2007) edited by Roger Spalding and Christopher Parker (preferably something more recent, but you get the idea).

This is really helpful, and really ****ed up I'm screwed!