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SETU Carlow Harvard Referencing: Introduction

A sample of referencing that you can use to see how you reference in a real situation

What is referencing?

Referencing is acknowledging all of the sources of information or ideas that are not your own, that you have used to create your assignment. Using the work of others in your assignments as evidence and support for your arguments is part and parcel of academic writing and it shows that you have engaged with academic materials during your research.

You must reference any type of material that is not your own original idea such as:

  • words that you have quoted directly from a source
  • rewriting the words or ideas of someone else in your own words (this is called paraphrasing)
  • statistics, charts or other specific pieces of information taken from another source
  • photographs, drawings, illustrations, or art that were not created by you
  • books, ebooks, journal articles, reports, websites, videos, podcasts, computer programmes, etc.

How to Reference.

There are three steps to referencing correctly:

  1. Cite where you have used the item within your assignment.
  2. Format the reference in the SETU Harvard Style.
  3. Create an alphabetical list of all references at the end of the assignment.

There are many ways to cite sources within your own work. Learning how to cite well and weave academic sources into your own writing is part of the challenge of learning to write academically. Reading academic material can help with this. There are many online courses and tutorials that can help you to develop your academic writing skills.

This course from Lund University is a good example.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge and appreciate the help given from other staff members in the making of this guide in particular Una Keating (Library assistant) who helped with the editing.  

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Breda Connell
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