Understanding Referencing: A Guide for University Students, Lecture notes of Auditing

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Referencing - Level 1

What is Referencing? When writing an assignment you will use information from textbooks, academic journals, websites and other sources. You will need to review and analyse this information. You will form your own ideas backed up with evidence to develop your own informed argument. It is essential that you acknowledge all the sources that you have used to write your answer – this is referencing. What is a reference? There are two parts to creating a reference:

1. The citation in the text This is the author’s details every time you quote or paraphrase their ideas. You need the authors name(s), date. Quotes and images need the page number as well. The public believes that financial audits are primarily used for identifying fraud (Cosserat and Rodda, 2009 ). 2. The full reference The citation points to the full detailed reference given in an alphabetical list at the end of the assignment. Cosserat, G. and Rodda, N. (2009) Modern auditing. 3rd^ ed. Chichester: Wiley. Example: This is an example of paraphrasing with the in-text citations:

And how the full reference is given in the Reference List in Harvard style: Why reference?

• It’s an assessed part of your assignment, usually 5- 10 % of total marks
• To avoid failing your assignment due to plagiarism - passing off other people's work as your own
• It acknowledges the copyrighted work of the authors whose material you are using
• It’s an opportunity to showcase the depth and breadth of your research
• To support and give academic credibility to your arguments
• To enable your sources to be traced and verified if necessary When and what do you need to reference?  Source of inspiration, ideas, theories or arguments  Direct quotes, including definitions  Paraphrasing – when you have used your own words to summarise points from other authors work.  Facts and figures - statistical information or examples  Images from websites and printed material  Multi-media sources such as videos, podcasts, radio programmes  Any other source you use to write your assignments! What do you need to include for a full reference? This varies according to the type of source you are using, but the basics are:  Name - who has written or produced the material