As you begin your transition from secondary school student to college student, there will be a lot of new information and a lot of differences that you will have to get used to in a short amount of time. Two of the most important differences you will learn are Referencing your work and Plagiarism. This will be some of the most important information you will hear in your time in college, whether your course is only a year long or your doing a PH.D. When you do college work lecturers don't want to see work done straight from a book, as it means you have just looked at a book for the answer and not done any work. They use referencing to help to show you researched some information to do your work. In my opinion, it is extremely important to learn and implement referencing early in college and I also feel it needs to be brought into secondary schools for some subjects as it would make learning the more advanced academic referencing much easier to learn if there is basic knowledge.
According
to the Student Information Desk in IT Blanchardstown, Referencing is
"acknowledging that the information has come from a different
writer.". (ITB Student Information Desk, 2013) This means that
anytime you use information from a source weather it is a book,
website, journal entry etc. you must reference the writer and where
you got the information from.
There
are 2 main types of referencing that are used in academic writing,
the Harvard Method and the IEEE Method. The Harvard method involves
in-text referencing, which means referencing the name of the author
and the year of publication of the source in the main body of the
text as well as putting a reference in a bibliography at the end of
the essay. IEEE referencing also involves in-text referencing using
numbers. As a reference is used it is given a number and at the end
of the essay put in the list of references in numerical order.
Plagiarism
is defined by Cardiff University as “the wrongful publication as
ones own, of the ideas or the expression of the ideas of another.” (Cardiff University, 2007). Plagiarism is a serious offence in all colleges and is punishable by
minimum of a 0% mark if you are found to have some plagiarism.
As a college student my experiences of referencing have being minimal, as I am still learning to reference properly. Over the first semester of college, plagiarism has being mentioned a lot by lecturers, mainly to keep us aware and to defer us from trying to take somebody else's work as our own.
As a
student, there are tips I can give in terms of referencing. Listen
to your lecturers about sources that they want referenced in essays
given during the year. Some lecturers may not want their lectures
referenced and certain websites, such as wikipedia, are seen as
unreliable, therefore avoid using them.
References:.
Cardiff University. 2007. Avoiding Plagiarism. [online] Available at: https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/plagiarism/tutorial/ [Accessed: 1 Dec 2013].
Cardiff University. 2007. Avoiding Plagiarism. [online] Available at: https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/plagiarism/tutorial/ [Accessed: 1 Dec 2013].
ITB Library. 2013. IEEE Referencing. [online] Available at: http://moodle.itb.ie/mod/scorm/player.php?a=135¤torg=Referencing_and_IEEE_ORG&scoid=277 [Accessed: 1 Dec 2013].
ITB Library. 2013. Harvard Referencing. [online] Available at: http://moodle.itb.ie/mod/scorm/player.php?a=134¤torg=Referencing_and_Harvard_1_ORG&scoid=275 [Accessed: 1 Dec 2013].
ITB Library. 2013. ITB Library: Your library. Your assignment.. [online] Available at: http://itblibrary.blogspot.ie/2013/11/your-library-your-assignment.html [Accessed: 2 Dec 2013].
