Citing and referencing are both essential for academic writing, but they are often forgotten by students. Citation can be fiddly, and referencing can take some time when you are already fed up with an assignment, but don’t make the mistake of ignoring these practices. All the best assignments cite and reference beautifully. Citing and referencing is especially important for Diploma students, and those thinking of going to university.

Citations

Citations are special kinds of tags you can add to sentences to indicate where they come from. In the Harvard style they include they author’s surname, the year published, and the page number (for books only). You usually add citations to the end of sentences (Obama, 2012). Sometimes you will see them sneakily disguised in sentences, as Holmes (1902) has explained.

If you can’t find a human author, use the organisation or website name, and if you can’t find a date, use this year (ADL, 2016).

At ADL, you format academic writing using the Harvard citation style. If you are studying or writing somewhere else, your citations may look different to this.

References

The term reference is often used loosely, to include footnotes and also the bibliography of an essay. At ADL you generally use the term to describe just the Bibliography, since the Harvard style avoids footnotes. 

References are put into a ‘List of References’ or ‘Bibliography’ at the end of the writing. Here you include all the items you have cited in the text, and no others.

References need much more information than Harvard style citations. Here you include different information like the author’s surname and initials, the year published, the title, the publisher or website, and the city published in (for books), or date accessed. Here is an example of a single reference. A full Bibliography section would include a reference for each item cited:

Raye, L. (2016). The Secret Tricks of Academic Referencing. [online] ADL Online Education. Available at: http://adlonlineeducation.com/blog-the-secret-tricks-of-academic-referencing-20.aspx [Accessed 13 Jun. 2016].

YOU NEED BOTH

The important thing to remember is that, in ADL assignments you need to both cite and reference. This is not just important for essays, but every time you use any source of information. Citations can be used for videos, speeches and leaflets as well as more ordinary academic sources. 

Don’t forget the C&R!