Referencing, Plagiarism and Turnitin

There are two ways to cite your authors:

• As part of the text.
  E.g. Brown (2020) found that ...
  The author's name is needed for the sentence to make sense, so it needs to be outside the brackets and part of the sentence.
• Supporting a point to indicate where you found the idea. E.g. Bodily communication is as important as verbal communication (Smith, 2015). 
  Here the author's name is not part of the sentence and needs to be inside the brackets.
  N.B. the fullstop goes after the citation so we know which sentence the citation belongs to.

Reference it as you would a website: either with an individual author or an organisation.

If the pdf displays within a browser use the URL of the pdf webpage.  

e.g. HCPC (2018) Standards of conduct, performance and ethics. Available at: https://www.hcpc-uk.org/globalassets/resources/standards/standards-of-conduct-performance-and-ethics.pdf (Accessed: 28 June 2021). 

If it opens up a separate document, then use the URL of the page it is linked from. 

e.g HCPC (2018) Standards of conduct, performance and ethics. Available at: https://www.hcpc-uk.org/standards/standards-of-conduct-performance-and-ethics/ (Accessed: 28 June 2021).  

Reference an ebook in the same way as a print book.

NB: The 13th edition of Cite them Right now states that only the publisher name is needed and not the place of publication. 

If you located an article via OneSearch, click through to the full text and you can usually find them there.  You sometimes have to open the pdf to see all the details, often located at the start of the article or in the footnotes.

If these details are still not available this may be because this article comes from a journal only available online or in preprint - in which case see the next 2 FAQs.   

A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a unique code number given to a journal article.  If you copy and paste it into a search engine it will give you the full details of the article. 

Most articles found online will have a DOI which should be included at the end of your reference.

eg Available at: https://doi.org/10.12968/bjcn.2018.23.12.606

Because a doi is a more stable link than the average URL, you don't need to add any (Accessed: ...) details when there is a doi. 

This is occurring more and more as journal articles are only being published online. Use the article number instead of page numbers.

Eg article number 23455 

See Cite them Right  

To show you have found the same idea from a number of sources, list them in chronological order separated by semi-colons. 

Example:

Recent studies (Strong and Taylor, 2015; Frost and Purkiss, 2021; Ahmed, 2023) indicate that.....

You need to write out in full the first time you cite the organisation along with the abbreviation e.g. Department of Health (DoH) (2021).  Subsequently you can put DoH (2021) in your in-text citations.  
You need to use the full name in the reference list. 

Some organisations such as the NHS, HCPC and the BBC are now well known by their abbreviations so no need to spell out in full.  

If you use a direct quote you need to put the words in speech marks and add a page number. 

If you paraphrase from a specific page Cite them right says you should include a page number.  

If you summarise from more than one page (refer to an author's ideas in general) you do not need to include a page number.  

Learn about writing citations for including page references (video).

In your text you need to include both the original author and the author of the book in which you read it, to make it clear that you have not read the original source.  The author you are reading may have used a direct quote or paraphrased/summarised the original.

E.g. Smith (2003, quoted in Allan, 2020, p.34)  - for a direct quote.

E.g. Smith (2003, cited in Allan, 2020) if it is summarised or paraphrased.

The item by Allan would go in in your Reference List as this is the source you have actually read.   

Please note that it is highly recommended you go to the original source where possible rather than use secondary referencing if you can avoid it.

Learn more about how to cite a secondary reference with Harvard Cite them right (video).

You can add an additional letter after the date for each one, both intext and in the reference list, e.g. 

Hurst (2020a)  

Hurst (2020b) 

There are many versions of Harvard and Cite them Right contains just one of these versions. Any citation you copy needs to be checked and edited against our Quick Guide to Referencing which is based on the Harvard option in Cite them Right.  See also the section below on Citation Generators.

You do not need an author for an Act of Parliament. Instead you use the name of the Act and the year it was created both in text and at the start of the full reference.  

See our Quickguide to legal and government referencing

Add your image onto a slide in your PowerPoint presentation. Add (author, date) underneath the image, this could be the photographer or an organisation e.g.  

(University of Cumbria, 2021)

In List:

University of Cumbria (2021) Fusehill street campus. Available at: https://www.cumbria.ac.uk/student-life/locations/ (Accessed: 6th July 2021).

For more specific guidance on images from collections see Cite them right.

If you have 4 or more authors you can use the first author followed by et al. within your text 

e.g. Vernon et al. (2019) claim that ... or (Vernon et al., 2019)

This video introduces using et al. within citations.

In the full reference list Cite them right states that you can use et al. or list all authors.  This may depend on tutor preference but listing them all is the safest and fairest option as it acknowledges all the authors' work.

You can use 'reference reminder phrases' in your next sentence rather than keep adding the citation.  But it needs to be absolutely clear to your reader who you are citing in this and any subsequent sentences.  

E.g. As shown by Smith (2012) it is important to follow the correct guidelines. She also highlights that ethics play a key role in practice. 

They can be either but are generally double, as you can set Turnitin to ignore quotation matches if they are in "double" speech marks.  It won't do this for singles.

Visit our GenAI page for specific examples of how to cite GenAI