About references

As you work on your assignments and projects, keep a list of references of relevant resources that you are using to support your work. These resources can include, but are not limited to, books, journals, online articles, online videos and audio recordings. Remember that the University’s Primo provides access to information about books and journals in the libraries and also online books available to you. Other online resources can be accessed via the ElecInfo pages provided by Information Services.

You are expected to reference all such works that you have read, watched or listened to. The main benefit is that anyone reading your work will know exactly what you have used and where they can find for more details about it. There are exceptions for “common knowledge” which you can reasonably expect the reader to possess; an obvious example is that you can expect the reader to know what a computer is without the need to cite original works by pioneers such as Babbage and von Neumann. If you are in doubt as to what is “common knowledge” it is always best to provide a suitable reference.

It is important to acknowledge and reference your sources; failing to acknowledge the sources of work that you have consulted can lead to accusations of Unacceptable Academic Practice. See the section on Good Academic Practice for more details.

The types of work to which you should normally reference include, but are not limited to:

  • text books and reference books;

  • scientific journals;

  • proceedings of scientific conferences;

  • theses or other project reports or documents;

  • any unpublished material that you have made use of;

  • web sites and specific web pages;

  • software (including software libraries) that you have used. For example, reference any public domain software, shareware, open source software, software from books, forums and commercial software;

  • the manufacturer’s literature for any specialised product that you have used.

When you are expected to write a project report or essay, you need to include references at the end of the documentation that you write. The references section is a formally structured list of sources from which you have gathered information. In each case you must give enough information to enable readers to locate the resources for themselves if they want more information.

References, styles and citations

The following concepts are used in this document:

  • Reference - A piece of information that includes sufficient details to let someone find the source. This will include information about titles, dates published and authors. See the following sub-section for examples of the information you could expect to see.

  • Styles - Within a document, e.g. your Project Report for the Major Project in the third year, it is expected that you use one style of referencing. This document talks about two styles, Author-Date and Numeric. There is no preference for which of these two general styles you use. Pick one and then use the style consistently.

  • Citation - A entry in your text that indicates a particular reference. The type of entry will depend on the style of referencing, as discussed in Styles. The citation will help your reader to find more information about the idea that you are discussing in your report.

Information about references

The following list indicates the information that you will use for references. Other information may be relevant depending on what is referenced. Not all references will need all of the information.

  • Authors/Editors and Year of Publication

  • Title (book/journal)

  • Edition / Volume / Series

  • Publisher and Place of Publication

  • Page References

  • URLs for web resources and dates when you accessed the resource

  • Digital Object Identifiers

Some examples for the Harvard style are available on the Information Services libguides site for Referencing & Plagiarism Awareness. The IEEE Referencing Guide includes many examples relevant for different sources.

Using references

At University-level study, it is expected that you would access materials beyond the lecture notes, such as books, papers, websites, videos and podcasts. Doing this helps you to learn more about a topic, which can help you to understand the problem and how you can develop your own solution. This is a particular skill that we discuss for the Major Project in the 3rd year, but it is applicable to other assignments that you do.

Once you start to build your list of references, it is a common error to mistake references or even printouts of papers for the knowledge that comes from actually reading them.

You need to look at the online sources, books and papers and see what you can learn from them. To be efficient, this comes in several stages:

  • Read the introduction and look at the section headings or a paper or the table of contents of a book. If the document is not relevant to your work, then move on to look at something else.

  • Skim read the resource, taking in the main ideas, and noting what you might want to spend more time looking at.

  • Decide what you want to know more about, and concentrate on those sections of the resource.

  • Re-read the most important items — it is common to find that you need to read and re-read some sections to fully understand them.

When you have identified a useful item and completed the steps outlined above, add it to your list of references for the assignment you are working on.