Academic Honesty. Citation and references.

It is a required feature of academic study that you have done some research into a topic and that you have copied down the ideas and great quotes your have come across!

It is always good practice to borrow the words from another author and include their words in your write up of that research. However you must quote them and not claim that the words are your own! If you do not put their words in quotation marks you are in effect pretending that those words / ideas are yours and this is called plagiarism; it is dishonest and illegal.

Citation.

This is where you integrate the words from another source into your own writing. So for example your sentence might read…

Nerdwriter (2016) defines intertextuality as, ‘something in a text that is shaped by another text.’

This is great and shows you’ve taken on board new ideas during your research!

Harvard Referencing

If you have mentioned a film or quoted someone else’s ideas or words you should note down a Harvard Reference to identity the source of your research.

This reference will include the name of the author or director, the name of the article or film, the date it was released of published, the place or origin… It is different for different material, so an article from a magazine is different from a film, is different from a text book.

There are several onlineĀ  generators which will create the Harvard Reference for you, you just need to tell it what sort of material you got the ideas from, was it a YouTube Video, a book, a podcast…?

Click to go to recommended reference generator

Reference List

At the end of each piece of work, whether it is your Portfolio Pages, a textual analysis essay, a video essay or a production report you should create a list of research sources.

This is essentially a list of all the Harvard References that you have collected during your research.

A Harvard reference list must:

  • Be on a separate sheet at the end of the document

  • Be organised alphabetically by author, unless there is no author then it is ordered by the source title

  • Be double spaced: there should be a full, blank line of space between each line of text

  • Contain full references for all in-text references used