bibliography and referencing

[geordieminx]

Ok, not sure whether this the right but my brain is mushed.

I'm doing my first assignment for uni, it says I have to inc a bibliograpy and referencing, now I know I have done this before, but it was about 100000000 years ago.

Can someone tell me how to do it please please, in idiots terms preferably.

Ta

It's a while since I've had to do it too, but from memory it was just a list at teh end which stated all the material you had used during your research and had to referred due in teh assignment. You had to give the authors name, the date of publication, who the publisher was (or the name of the journal etc containing the paper) and the title of the book/research paper. HTH

Does your college/course handbook not give you a guide to referencing? I'm currently studying and our coursebook includes a brief guide plus the college issues some guidelines. If you don't mind putting your email up here I could send it to you (it's from the institute of education so should be fairly authoratitive).

Usually they just want to make sure youve done reading to back up your ideas and that you haven't plagiarised your work ie you've attributed ideas/quotes where necessary. Usual style is to say for example

As Bloggs says, "xxxxxx blah" (1983, p24)

or

It is often said that "blah blah blah," (Bloggs, 1983, p24).

Does that make sense or is of any use?

I usually use teh Harvard referencing system - it's very common. This site will give you the rules:

education.exeter.ac.uk/dll/studyskills/harvard_referencing.htm

depends on what subject you are studying Geordieminx, science references are done really differently to literature or humanities subjects.

In science you make a statement "and it has been shown to work with blue elephants [1]..." then at the end of the paper you've written you list all the sources of info as they appear in order in the text...

[1] A Smith and B Jones, Elephant Research 2 134-167 (1998).
[2] ...

Humanities and arts tend to make references differently, like this "and so Shakespeare is believed to be a man (Rogers 1998).." then list the references alphabetically at the end.

I'm in science and I've never numbered refs unless specifically asked to - always done it alphabetically. Numbered refs are to be avoided unless specified - they are a total pain as you have to keep changing the numbers whenever you move/change anything.

yep you dont number refs - if you are humanities/social science then it should be like this blah de blah (Smith, 2008) and then in the refs it should be:

Smith, A. (2008) The Book Title. London: Penguin.

or a journal:

Smith, A. (2008) 'The Article title', The Journal Title 50(5): 93-95.

Does that make sense? It doesnt really matter whether you choose Harvard or Chicago as long as its all consistant.

I'm doing Business and Management, so its mainly just a few websites. I think I am actually going to struggle as the majority of the assignment is done off the top of my head.... it is on mobile commerce, the lecturer is unaware that I have worked in the telecommunications industry for 10 years...

have a look at some journals in your field and go with that. So long as you are consistent. I would avoid numbering too as you do end up having to change things if you add something else in. If you have multiple authors you can say (Jones et al, 1988) in the text, but if you have only two authors then its (Smith and Jones, 1988) in the text. Full refs in the bibliography. Try and reference the original piece of work as apposed to websites and reviews. There is no steadfast rules, well at least there wasn't for me when i wrote up my PhD (Science) so long as you are consistent in style.

With regards to stuff off the top of your head, for undergrad essays etc it is probably fine not to be too anal about referencing, but if anything is to be published, say for a dissertation etc then you must reference the original authors. So whoever showed that xyz=xyz if you see what i mean. So even if you remember it off the top of your head, you have to quote the original source.

Numbered references dont have to be painful. I use Word to write my documents, and it sorts out the numbering itself, so if you delete things or move things about the numbers change too.

thats a good point tigger, but i would have had to work out how to do that, which just was overload on my poor brain at the time

It isnt hard. When you are at the place in the text where you want to put in a reference just click on "references" and then "Insert endnote" It will do the number for you, and you write in the details of the reference.
Then anytime you move it about or add or remove other references it just sorts out the numbering itself.
Easy.

You can get into difficulties if you have a humungously long thesis that you'd rather keep as seperate documents - that's why I don't cite as you write even though I have the software and keep an electronic library (well that's my excuse anyway!).

hm...we were told that as undergraduates we are not allowed an opinion, well...we are, as long as we can back it up with evidence that a bigger and better brain that ours has also come to that conclusion, etc...

we use Harward Referencing...
Reference list includes all that you have actually used materal from...Bibliography is any material that you have read and that was relevant and may have given you ideas, but that you haven't directly used....