Research Support
Citation and citation style
A citation is a way of giving credit to individuals for their creative and intellectual works that you utilized to support your research. It can also be used to locate particular sources and combat plagiarism. Typically, a citation can include the author's name, date, and location of the publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifier).
Citations consist of standard elements, and contain all the information necessary to identify and track down publications. A citation style dictates the information necessary for a citation and how the information is ordered, as well as punctuation and other formatting.
Choice of a citation style
There are many different ways of citing resources from your research. The citation style sometimes depends on the academic discipline involved. For example:
- APA (American Psychological Association) is used by Education,
- Psychology, and Sciences. (Style guide is available in the library in Print form)
- MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used by the Humanities
- Chicago/Turabian style is generally used by Business, History, and the Fine Arts
Referencing
Referencing is a crucial part of successful academic writing and is key to your assignments and research, and we know it’s one that can be confusing at times. That’s why the Library has put together a collection of resources to help you acknowledge your sources properly.
Understanding Plagiarism
The University expects students to understand their responsibility for academic honesty and to develop the knowledge and skills to avoid plagiarism. There is a lot of talk about plagiarism and how to avoid it . It has often been identified as a complex issue, especially now, in the age of the internet. It can be deliberate or unintentional, and universities have been tightening up their policies to assist them in ‘detecting, deterring and dealing with’ its occurrence.
Turnitin
Turnitin is a software that is used for checking and marking student assignments. Some courses allow you to hand in your assignments via Turnitin and for the markers to give feedback on them via Turnitin.
Turnitin will also give you an "originality report" where it will tell you about how similar your writing is to other texts that can be found online and in other student assignments.
To find out more about the importance of this kind of software and how staff and students can use it, check out the videos below.
Turnitin Instructor User Manuals/Tutorial
Literature Review
A literature review is usually written as part of a postgraduate thesis proposal or at the beginning of a dissertation or thesis. A literature review gives an overview of the area of study: what has already been said on the topic; who the key writers are; what the prevailing theories and hypotheses are; what questions are being asked; and that methodologies are appropriate and useful. In a literature review, you demonstrate that you have read and understood previous and current research in the area.
