Cite Them Right: The Essential Referencing Guide by
Accurate citing and referencing is good academic practice, it enhances the presentation of your work, and can improve your marks. The Business School use Harvard Style. Citations should be given in the form of the author’s surname and the year in brackets in the text wherever you have used other people’s work. Library Services provides tools to help you to layout your citations and references accurately – please see the links above.
Always check referencing advice given in your programme and module handbooks, and check with your lecturer if you are in any doubt. Failing to acknowledge your sources is plagiarism, which is academic misconduct.
If you need help with Citing and Referencing, postgraduates, researchers and staff should contact Emilia.Brzozowska-Szczecina@city.ac.uk and undergraduates should contact Andrew.Medder@city.ac.uk.
Whenever you have used any source to inform your work, you must cite it in your text and add it to a properly-formatted reference list at the end of your work. You need to cite all the evidence, ideas, theories, data or direct quotes – or indeed anything else – that you found in someone else’s work. Learn more about the basics of referencing.
Examples of many more types of material can be found in Cite Them Right Online.
Some of our specialist financial databases, such as Bloomberg, Eikon and Morningstar, are tricky to reference because they do not have URLs to direct your reader to. For data taken from these types of databases, we have developed a reference format consistent with Cite Them Right Online for you to follow:
Name of database including version if available (Year of publication or last update) Title if available. Available at: Name of supplier (Accessed: 1 January 2015).
Make sure to include the exact date that you accessed the specific data you are citing. If you do not have information, such as the version of the software, miss it out. If it is possible to include more specific detail about the information you are using, do so. For instance:
Datasteam Advance Version 4.0 (2015). Available at: Thomson Reuters (Accessed: 12 August 2015).
Bloomberg (2015) Stock Price Graph for Apple, 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2014. Available at: Bloomberg (Accessed: 21 July 2015).
You would then cite these references in your text using the database name and the year of publication or last update, for instance (Bloomberg, 2016). If you have several references to the same database in the same year, follow the instructions in Cite Them Right Online under Citing sources published in the same year by the same author.
The most important thing about constructing your reference list is that is remains consistent, so if you are in doubt about how to reference something and must make a guess, look carefully at other types of references in the same style and construct it to match as well as you can.
RefWorks is an bibliographic software tool which allows you to manage your research material by importing and adding your references to an online database. You can then manage your references and use their details to insert into text documents and create bibliographies and, share with your colleagues.
One of the best ways to master Citing and Referencing is by practicing.
These quizzes allow you to test your citing and referencing skills.