Saturday, April 30, 2016

Citing and Referencing: Identifying Academic Sources and Integrating the Ideas of Published Authors

The source of information used in university assignments is generally from an authority. Authority is an author or a well known writer who has his work published and patent. His work can be published in any book, magazine, journal, web page, newspaper article and can take any form. From such a work one can easily find various theoretical ideas, critical evaluations, views and scholarly opinions easily. The source of information which a reader used can be grouped into two main categories:
Primary source: This data relates to publicly available data such as historical documents, raw data data from experiments or demographic records.
Secondary Source : This data draws information from primary data and is produced for public use in the form of a journal article, magazine article or any other printed stuff.



These academic sources of information differ completely from one’s own view or opinion. The conclusion or outcomes of discussion with a friend or a relative also differs a lot from academic source of information.Even magazine or newspaper article opinion does not come into play when one talk about academic source of information.Students draw information from these academic sources as they turn out to be great assignment help tools. One of the major factors of using academic source of information is that they are supported by a very strong literature which forms the basis of assignment help. University management  assignments help to dig this literature and find out points of similarity and points of difference. Assignment help experts always adhere to the referencing guidelines before submitting a write up.
Hence, it is important to quote these authors in the assignment whenever seeking help from such tools. This technique of referring to authors in one’s writing is called citing, documenting, or in-text referencing.
How to cite or referencing?
There are generally different ways to cite or refer the thoughts taken from a particular literature. One of the  ways is APA (American Psychological Association) referencing system. Other citing techniques used are Harvard, MLA, Chicago. APA follows the author-date method to cite a author. To start with the author’s name is written first, followed by the year in which it was published. The author, date can be used in the body of the sentence or is used in brackets at the end of the sentence. By embedding the author’s name within the sentence, body it increases it’s clarity in the mind of the reader. The full reference detail can be found at the end.

However , there are certain tips on how to cite an author :  Read How to cite)
Authors can be cited within the body of the sentence or at the end in brackets. It is recommended to use both the methods.
To remove dependency on similar verbs when citing like “Mc Donalds (1999) states” and “Peterson (2000) states” there are other verbs which can be used like agrees, assert, believe,claims, etc.
If there are two or more authors with the same surname always include their first name to distinguish their publications.
If two or more works are published by the author in the same year, then add a and b respectively in the year of publication like 1992a and 1992b.
For the work with no date, add n.d after the name
Hence, in this way there are various other techniques used while citing or referencing. One must know the basic rules when citing. It is important to put the ideas in own words as this shows that the concept and an idea is integrated well by the learner. Always remember to give credit to the author whose work one is referring to.