Study Skills - help with referencing

Here are some useful links to information on the University of Birmingham website relating to referencing, plagiarism and software to help students.

There is a lot of help and advice for new students, and finding your way through to what you need is not always easy. This post aims to help with that by choosing some of the web pages that are most relevant and putting them into some context.

At the general level, the University's Guide to Effective Learning Resources offers a lot of advice, but is perhaps a bit daunting for new students. Concentrating on referencing and plagiarism for the moment, the 'guide to citing references' link is a good place to start, explaining that UoB has adopted the Harvard system (slightly altered) as the standard for academic writing.

For more specific advice on how to use the Harvard system in practice, this page is very good.
It gives short clear examples of how to cite other authors' ideas in your writing, and how to create a bibliography. The final link on this page is to a very detailed 'How to..' guide on preparing and quoting references using the Harvard system in accordance with UoB requirements.

South Bank University in London have produced a very detailed help sheet on Harvard referencing too - it is particularly useful on how to reference web pages (page 11).

The other links on the 'guide to citing references' page tell students about all the various software packages that are available to help with referencing. For students up to and including Masters level, Refworks should do the job. This is free to UoB students, there is training available online, and it will help students to:

• find texts and import full details into Refworks
• create a database of texts they have read
• use a 'Cite and Write' facility to create bibliographies very easily via Word
• make sure that their work conforms to the UoB Harvard standard

Endnote is another package which does the same job, but the library service recommend it more for PhD level students. It costs about £20-30 for students.

Most departments will arrange induction training for library services, so students will be able to get advice and support on the software when they need it.