Referencing: Writing references

The APA citation style is an author-date referencing style provided in the American Psychological Association's rules and conventions for documenting sources used in your research.

See the documents below for guidance on APA referencing and an example of what a reference list might look like, or visit the APA Style web site.

Additionally you may wish to consult the APA publication manual or Concise rules of APA style which provide more detailed guidance on referencing and extensive instruction for formatting your document and other style elements.  APA also provides a range of online guidance on formatting your document and other style elements including:

• The Student Paper Setup Guide - especially useful for dissertation and long documents (but any guidance from your module or course should take priority).
• Sample Papers - including annotated examples of student and professional papers.
• The Style and Grammar Guidelines - including paper format, citations, bias-free language, tables & figures, grammar and publication process.
• Inclusive Language Guidelines - support using culturally sensitive terms and phrases.
• Handouts and Guides - for further useful resources.
• APA Blog 7th ed. - hints and tips on wide range of APA questions e.g. citing music albums, translated works etc.

Harvard is a commonly used author name and date referencing style and is adopted widely in the University.The  Harvard Stirling University style has been developed to provide guidance to students and for use within RefWorks.

See the documents below for guidance on using the Harvard Stirling University style and examples of what reference lists might look like.

You may find Harvard Stirling University Examples (including guidance for RefWorks) especially helpful as this provides a list of document types e.g. Book chapters, Journal Articles, Blogs, Web Pages, TV programmes etc. with details of what information you need for the reference as well as and example of how to cite it in your text and enter it in your reference list (bibliography).

The IEEE style is a numeric system, where citations are numbered in your text within square brackets e.g. [1]. The citation in your text corresponds to a full reference in the list of references at the end of your work. To acknowledge paraphrased ideas the citation number(s) should appear on the same line as the text inside any punctuation.

All references must have their own number. It is not permissible to use one number to cite multiple sources.

Reuse the same number for all subsequent citations of the same source.

Here are a few examples of how citations might appear:

... as demonstrated by Smith [4] and Brown and Jones [5].

... as mentioned earlier [2], [4]–[7], [9] a number of studies have investigated these issues

Multiple authors. If you mention the author name(s) as part of your sentence give both names if there are only two. If there are 3 or more authors give only the first name followed by et al. e.g. ... Wood et al. [7] suggested an alternative approach.

Add page numbers and other pinpoints to specific ideas to the citation number within the square brackets e.g.:

[3, pp. 5-10]

[3, Fig. 1]

[3, Algorithm 5]

A section of text with in-text citations might look like:

This leads to greater needs of probabilistic analysis tools, both for system planning [1] and for the daily system operation. From the first proposals in the 1970s [2], a great deal of literature can be found about it. The most straightforward method of solving this problem is Monte Carlo simulation [1, pp. 6-7].

The reference list appears at the end of your work in number order e.g.:

[1] F. P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary ed. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

[2] T. DeMarco and T. R. Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd ed. New York: Dorset House Publications, 1999.

[3] M. Fowler, UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, 3rd ed. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004.

[4] J. Seguel, “The doctoral program in Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering of the University of Puerto Rico,” Future Gener. Comp. Sy., vol. 19, no. 8, pp. 1293–1298, 2003.

See the guides below for more detail including formatting rules for each reference type e.g. books, chapters,  journal articles etc., abbreviations for journal articles and other words and a fuller example of what a reference list might look like.

You may also wish to consult the IEEE Editorial Style Manual. Section V provides further advice and guidance.

OSCOLA is a legal referencing style which has citations in footnotes and a full reference list at the end of the document.

See the documents below for guidance on using OSCOLA and consult the OSCOLA Help pages for further information e.g. citing sources from foreign jurisdictions.