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Referencing & Plagiarism: Referencing

Referencing and Citation

It's really important to learn how to reference your work properly.  A good piece of coursework is full of references to work that's been done by others before you, so good referencing habits will get you great marks. There are two parts to referencing:

  • Identify the reference in the text of your work. This is citation or in-text citation.
  • Provide a detailed list of all references you have used at the end of your work, this is a bibliography or reference list.

There are many different referencing styles. The most commonly used at Middlesex University is Harvard. For detailed information on how to cite and reference, please have a look at Cite Them Right basics. 

The slides below give a basic introduction to referencing in your writing and how to use RefWorks.  There is more detail on RefWorks on the next page.

Converting lists of references in Word for RefWorks, EndNote,etc

Referencing Style Guides

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Cite Them Right Online is the standard source of information for citation and referencing.  Please use this unless you are studying one of the subjects listed below.

RefWorks: reference management software

Other reference management software

Only RefWorks is supported by Middlesex University, so if you haven't decided what to use, please look at RefWorks first.   Alternatives are:

LaTex and BibTeX users

If you are in Computer Science and using LaTex for writing, you can set export references from Library Search using the BibTeX button and from Google Scholar if in Settings you set Bibliography Manager to BibTeX.

In LaTex, if you are using the IEEE numerical referncing style, check the following to make sure this is set correctly:

To ensure you are using IEEE numerical reference style include the command to control your bibliography style before you include the bibliography.  The bibliography style for number referencing is "plain". So the resulting text is as follows:

 \bibliographystyle{plain}

 \bibliography{path/filename}

where 'path' is the path of the file, and 'filename' is the filename of the '.bib' file.