UK EssaysAdvice

In academic essay writing, there are two things you have to remember to input: citation and referencing. Without them, your essay might garner a failing mark due to plagiarism. The advantage of having citations and references in your essay is that it establishes your written work to be well-researched and not plagiarised. You have also helped other readers by providing them the sources of your cited passages so they can do their own research on a related topic.

Although used and interchanged most of the times, citations and references are two different matters altogether. Citations are those passages you have included within your essays. References include the location of the source you have taken as additional input.

Usually it is your professor who will assign you with the referencing format to use depending on the subject or topic of the essay. The most common formats are the MLA, APA, Chicago, OSCOLA and Harvard referencing systems, among others.

The Harvard referencing format, particularly, is the most commonly used system for essays pertaining to education and social sciences. It basically includes an in-text citation within the body of the essay and a bibliography at the end of the essay. The in-text citation will include the passage used, enclosed in quotation marks, and the name of the author and the year of publication, enclosed in brackets. The bibliography provides all the details of the in-text citations you have used, like the title, publisher and location of publication, among others. The details are arranged not by order of appearance but alphabetically.

The reference you have included in your essay will vary depending on where you have acquired the information itself and how you have presented the information. When you directly write the author’s name, the reference following it will only include the year of publication. If you did not mention the author in the essay, both the author’s name and year will be written in your reference. When making direct quotations from the source or author, you also include the year of publication and page number, enclosed in brackets.

The same rule goes for writing bibliographic entries. For printed sources, the author’s name is mentioned including the name of the book/article, the pages where the passages were found, the publisher and the location and year of publication. For electronic sources, however, the bibliographic entry will include all the details required for citing print journals or books, this time added with the name of the Web site address and the date you have accessed the material.