Academic Research Booklet

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Creating references Formatting references and/ or footnotes and a bibliography correctly can be a time-consuming and laborious business. Thankfully, Microsoft Word has a feature which does all of the formatting for you — though you do still have to enter all of the publication data yourself. A guide for using Word to style your references can be found on the library dashboard Research, Referencing and Academic Honesty pages - or better yet, book a meeting with Ms Eldred in the library .

In general there are five main things you need to include in references: Author Surname, First name OR Organisation Name. (Date). Title . Publisher, Location.

These five things remain consistent regardless of the type of source but look a little different:

Book: Author Surname, First name. (Date). Book Title . Publisher, City or Country.

Journal article: Author Surname, First name. (Date). Article Title . Journal name, Volume (Issue Number), page numbers. Retrieved from URL

Website: Author Surname, First name OR Web Site or Organisation. (Date). Name of Web Page . Name of Web site. Retrieved Year, Month Day. URL

Regardless of what style of referencing you use the most important thing is consistency . For example you should either make sure you italicise all article titles or don’t italicise at all; put brackets around all your publications dates or don’t use them at all. In a nutshell, all references should be formatted the same way. Obviously this will differ slightly between source type however all types should be formatted in the same way i.e. all book references should be formatted the same way as each other, all websites should be formatted the same way as each other etc. If you use Word to create your references the formatting will be automatically consistent.