Academic work is not limited to your own views and opinions, but is developed by thinking about ideas put forward by others. When you write an assignment or essay, it is very important that you acknowledge the source of anyone else's ideas that you have used or mentioned in your work. This is called referencing. These sources can be books, journal articles, newspaper reports, conference proceedings or web pages. In fact anything at all!

Whenever you directly copy the words of another author (quoting) or put their ideas into your own words (paraphrasing) you must acknowledge that you have done so. If you don't, you could be accused of plagiarism - a charge that is taken very seriously by the academic world.

How you acknowledge somebody else's work depends on the style of referencing you are following. This guide explains how to use the Harvard, MLA, Numeric and Vancouver referencing styles.