Referencing Exercises (Total Marks: 24)

Accurate referencing enhances your credibility and authority as a writer.

Referencing your sources acknowledges the work of the original authors; it helps
others to locate the same sources for their own learning purposes; and it also helps
you to assert your ‘own voice’ in assignments, as you can use sources to lend support
to your own ideas or arguments.

Test your knowledge of referencing with one or more the following four exercises. The
answers and comments are to be found at the end of the worksheet.

Exercise 1: Is a Reference Needed? (Marks: 10)

When is a reference necessary in an assignment? Decide if a reference to a source is

needed in the following situations.

Situation Yes No

1. When quoting directly from a published source.

2. When using statistics or other data that is freely available from a

publicly accessible website.

3. When summarizing the cause of undisputed past events and

where there is agreement by most commentators on cause and
effect.

4. When paraphrasing a definition found on a website and when no

writer, editor or author’s name is shown.

5. When summarizing or paraphrasing the ideas of a key

commentator or author, but taken from a secondary source, e.g.
general reference book.

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 Situation Yes No

6. When summarizing in a concluding paragraph of your

assignment what you discussed and referenced earlier in your
text.

7. When including in your assignment photographs or graphics that

are freely available on the Internet and where no named
photographer or originator is shown.

8. When emphasizing an idea, you have read that you feel makes
an important contribution to the points made in your
assignment.

9. When summarizing undisputed and commonplace facts about

the world.

10. When using aphorisms, such as: “Pennywise, pound

foolish”.

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Exercise 2: Where Should the Citations Go? (Marks: 3)

Citations are the full or partial references that you place into the text of your
assignment to identify the source of evidence presented.

For example, with the Harvard (that’s what we follow at Northampton) and APA
referencing styles the citations used are the last names of authors or originators of the
source in question, followed by the year of its publication, e.g. (Handy 1996).

These citations should connect with the full detail of the source contained in the
alphabetical list of references at the end of the assignment. For example, the following
essay paragraph contains two citations that help the reader to identify the source of
the definition used (i.e. Coleman and Chiva 1991) and the hypothesis presented (i.e.
Hopson and Scaly 1999).

Life planning is a process to encourage people to review their lives, identify life
priorities, consider options and make plans to implement choices (Coleman
and Chiva 1991). It is an idea that started in the USA, but has found its way
to Britain and the rest of Europe in recent years. Hopson and Scally (1999)
suggest the process is built on seven life management skills: knowing yourself;
learning from experience; research and information retrieval skills; setting
objectives and making action plans; making decisions; looking after yourself;
and communicating with others.

Look at the following three brief extracts and decide if a citation is necessary, and, if so,
where it should go. Mark the relevant point in the text with a X.

1. A major study of British school leavers concluded that parents had a major
influence on the kind of work entered by their children. The children were
influenced over a long period of time by the values and ideas about work of
their parents. A later study reached the same conclusion, and showed a link
between the social and economic status of parents and the work attitudes and
aspirations of their teenage children.

2. Climatologists generally agree that the five warmest years since the late
nineteenth century have been within the decade, 1995-2005, with the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the World Meteorological
Organization (WMO), ranking 2005 as the second warmest year behind 1998.

3. It has been argued that federalism is a way of making sense of large

organisations and that the power and responsibility that drives federalism is a
feature of developed societies and can be extended into a way forward for
managing modern business: “authority must be earned from those whom it is
exercised”.

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Exercise 3: “I Didn’t Reference the Source Because…” (Marks: 6)

Below are six statements that might be made by students for not referencing a
particular source in an assignment. They all start with “I didn’t reference the source
because…”

However, imagine you were a tutor what would you say in response to these
statements? Six likely tutor responses are shown. Match the likely response to the
statement. Write the most likely response number in the right-hand column below.

Statements Response
Number:

a. I didn’t reference the source in the text of the assignment because I put
the source in the bibliography.
b. I didn’t reference the source because I found this theory on a Wiki
Internet site; anyone can contribute to these, and no particular author
is named.
c. I didn’t reference the source because the statistics were taken from a
government website, which are there for the whole world to see and
use.
d. I didn’t reference the source because it just gave me ideas to use in my
assignment; I changed most of words in the article to my own.
e. I didn’t reference the source of the definition because it was from a
tutor handout; everyone in class was given a copy.
f. I didn’t reference the source because no author or writer’s name was
shown on the website.

Responses

Match each statement shown above with the appropriate tutor response from the list
below.

1. If no named author or writer is shown, you should cite and reference the name
of the originator of the source, which can be a name of an organization, or other
source.
2. Readers need to match in-text citations with the full details of sources in a list of
references. This enables readers to find and use the sources for themselves, if
required.
3. The source of all data like this must be fully referenced. Readers may, for
example, want to learn or examine the methodology for the research and data
collection.
4. It is advisable, wherever possible, to use primary sources in an assignment,
rather than secondary sources. A primary source, in this example, would be the
originator of the theory. Secondary sources may not always be reliable.
However, if you do use a secondary source, it needs to be properly referenced.
5. Any source that has played a significant contribution to your assignment must be
fully referenced. By doing this you acknowledge the part another person has
played in the development of your own ideas.
6. This came from work produced by someone else and not by you. It also
contributes to the reader’s understanding of terms you have used in your
assignment and so needs to be properly referenced.

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Exercise 4: Referencing Errors (Marks: 5)

A number of the sources below, presented in the Harvard Style of referencing,

contain one or more errors. Identify and summarise in the right-hand column below
the nature of any errors that you spot.

References Error(s)?

Http://www.bbc.co.uk/bob/callcentres/ [Accessed
09/08/2004].

BUSINESS STRATEGIES (2000). Tomorrow’s Call

Centres: A Research Study.

DEPARTMENT FOR TRADE AND INDUSTRY (2004).

The UK Contact Centre Industry: A Study’. [Report].
London: Department for Trade and Industry.

HEALTH and SAFETY EXECUTIVE. Psychosocial

Working Conditions in Great Britain in 2004.

HUWS, U (1999). Virtually There: The Evolution of

Call Centres. [Report]. London: Mitel Telecom Ltd.

HUWS, U (1993). Teleworking in Britain: A Report to

the Employment Department. Research Series No 18,
Oct 1993. London: Department of Employment.

HUWS, U (1996). eWorking: An Overview of the

Research. [Report]. London: Department of Trade
and Industry.

© Colin Neville [email protected] July 2008