Referencing
Work submitted for assessment at university—such as essays, reports and dissertations—should be the product of careful independent study. Typically, in preparing your work, you'll consult a range of texts, or 'sources', produced by well-informed authors, such as peer-reviewed journal articles and academic books. It's crucial that you acknowledge any sources which have informed, directed or shaped your work in some way. The formal process of acknowledging these sources is known as 'referencing'.Why is referencing important?
By referencing accurately and consistently, you can:
- demonstrate the extent of your work outside of class
- acknowledge other people’s work—its significance and/or limitations
- point to evidence which supports your own conclusions and arguments
- help a reader (or viewer, or listener) to locate your sources
There are many different referencing styles, so you should follow the one specified in your assessment guidelines. Most of the time, you will be expected to follow your own school's style (see below), although there may be exceptions. If you have questions or concerns, contact your module leaders.
So you'll probably hear this word 'referencing' and you might be wondering what it is, you might have been doing a bit of referencing before, but it might be something that's quite new to you. But the general purpose of it is to demonstrate your reading within your writing. So, showing the reader which sources of evidence you've been using, where you've taken that information from, to give credit to those original sources, and you'll have specific pieces of information you need to include about those sources. And that's to help the reader find those original sources of evidence and be able to access them.
So referencing isn't just about writing and formatting the references, it's about much more than that, it’s about how you actually incorporate sources into the assignment, how you give this credit, the quality and the type of source you're using. So you will see marks in your assignments for referencing formatting, and that's usually quite a small number of marks. But actually using these sources and how we incorporate them and use them to build arguments, that's what's worth the bulk of the marks for referencing.
So we were talking about research-led assignments and a research-led approach, and the referencing is that demonstration of how you're using the evidence, what evidence you're using to support and develop the arguments of the points you're making as well.
You will have a specific referencing style that you're expected to use and there's lots out there and you need to make sure that you're
using the right ones, so definitely check with your programme leader or your module leader what you're expected to use and follow the University guidelines for that particular style or your School to make sure that you are writing those as expected.
School referencing guidelines
School of Arts and Creative Industries
School of Applied Sciences
Students on School of Applies Sciences modules should follow APA style, unless otherwise instructed.
School of Computing, Engineering & the Built Environment
School of Health and Social Care
Students on School of Health and Social Care modules should follow APA style, unless otherwise instructed.
Reference management software
When working with a large number of sources, it can be a good idea to use reference management software. This can help you to collect, organise and save the publication details of your research materials, which can then be exported to documents automatically.
The University library recommends two referencing management services, Mendeley and EndNote, both of which are free to use for Edinburgh Napier students. There are alternatives, although many free services will produce very inaccurate references. Whatever software you decide to use, always commit to a careful edit, checking your references against the recommended guidelines, before you submit your work.
For more on our recommended software, see the library's guide to reference management.