How to Reference

COMP107 Lectures 2020-10-31

The purpose of referencing is to show how work extends the current state-of-the-art knowledge in the area, proof originality of work, give credit to other people’s work, support and validate arguments made and demonstrate familiarity with work done in the area.

Culture of Citing

For fiction there might be sources in your work, but these are never acknowledged, unless they serve a literary purpose.

In journalism there must be sources but these are rarely acknowledged. Exceptions may include quotations and for reports. These acknowledgements are not always in a format considered acceptable in academia.

Dependency on Discipline

In academic writing all sources that make a contribution to you work must be acknowledged.

Styles can be different from discipline to discipline, for example in philosophy there is a huge amount of referencing. However, in mathematics concepts are often named after the person who made or discovered them or you may use a concept which has very specific wording but you won’t reference in the same way as a philosophy paper.

Rules of Thumb

If you use words or ideas from any documents, even produced by yourself, then the source must be cited.
If you gain words or ideas through conversation, written or spoken, the the source must be cited.
If you use the exact words from any medium it must not only be cited but also indicated as a quotation. ""
If you reproduce any material then the source must be cited.

No Citation is Required for:

Your own experiences that have not been published before.
You are writing about your own work that have not been published before.
You are reusing your own materials.
You are using common knowledge or generally accepted facts.
In the context of student submission, if you use facts but not exact words form recommended textbooks.

How to Refer to a Source

Just by looking at the reference a knowledgeable reader must collect all information about the source. You should also have an idea about the type of a source from the structure.

Refer to the slides for the types of source.

URLs are not enough

This is as they don’t give all the information about a source and may not be valid in the future. URLs are fine when given in addition to other information.

Digital Object Identifiers

DOIs are a system of creating a perma-link to a digital reference online. They are preferable over URLS but still they should be given in addition to a conventional reference.

Types of References

What information is required about when the work can be obtained depends on it’s type. For example here are references for a book¹ and a journal paper².

For how to refer to any individual type of media refer to the slides. There are also examples.

Herman T. Tavani. 2010. Ethics and Technology: Controversies, Questions, and Strategeis for Ethical Computing (3^rd ed.). Wiley Publishing. ↩
Herman T. Tavani. 2011. Can we Develop Aritficial Agents Capable of Making Good Moral Decisions?. Minds Mach. 21 ,3 (August 2011), 465-474. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11023-011-9249-8 ↩