STACS - Understanding Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse: Referencing

This section explains the importance of citations and why you need to use them in your essays. Please use the documentation below to improve your understanding of citations. The College has policies on plagiarism and your own department might provide advice on citations and bibliographies, so please check these as well.

You should provide references when you are:

• directly quoting from the text of another work
• paraphrasing someone else's work, theories or ideas
• using someone else's work when developing your own ideas and arguments
• indirectly referring to the text of other works
• using illustrations, diagrams, tables or figures from other sources

If a fact is regarded as common knowledge, e.g. dates, events, (The Battle of Hastings was in 1066), you would not be expected to provide a reference. If in doubt, provide a reference.

MA Understanding Domestic Violence at Sexual Abuse requires you to use the Harvard style of referencing.  This is a 'name and date' style where you use the author's name and date in parentheses in your in-text citation (Smith, 1989) and then provide a separate list of the sources cited alphabetically by author at the end of your work.

We recommend this book to help you:

Pears, R. & Shields, G. (2016) Cite them right: the essential referencing guide. 10^th edn.  Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.  We have this in print and online (available off-campus).

The most important thing to remember when referencing is to be consistent. 

Whilst you can keep notes of the sources you use by hand, there is software available that can make managing your references simpler. This is particularly time saving if you're dealing with large numbers of references. We recommend all postgraduate students use online referencing software.

Zotero is free open source software and you don't have to be a student to use it - you don't need to sign in with your Goldsmiths email address and your references are available even after you finish your studies. Once you download the plugin for your Internet browser, you'll be able to directly capture references from catalogues, databases and websites. There is also a plugin for Word that allows you to create in-text citations and bibliographies. If you would like help using Zotero, please contact your subject librarian.

Other software includes EndNote Web and Mendeley, which are somewhat similar to Zotero and perform the same functions. However, we do not provide training for these software. But it is very simple and quick to learn the basics of Zotero. See below for three short videos that the library created with TaLIC. There are also many screencast tutorials available, as well as many videos on Youtube that will demonstrate how to use Zotero.

Plagiarism is cheating and can be defined as "to copy (ideas, passages of text, etc) from someone else’s work and use them as if they were one’s own” (Chambers 21^st Century Dictionary, 1999)

It is a serious offence whether accidental and unintentional e.g. careless use of copying and pasting or intentional e.g. using essay writing services. Goldsmiths has clear guidelines about plagiarism.  At the very least, a student found guilty of plagiarism can expect to receive a fail for the piece of work, but other, more serious punishments may be given, including dismissal from College in extreme cases.

Avoiding plagiarism

Plagiarism can initially be difficult to understand and many students might not realise what constitutes plagiarism and what doesn’t.

For your assignment you will have done plenty of background reading to help you formulate your own ideas.  When writing, you will discuss what you have learned from your background reading to show how this has influenced your views and arguments. 

To avoid plagiarism the sources you use and refer to must be correctly cited and referenced.  Although plagiarism is not just words (it includes ideas, images, etc), paraphrasing/summarising is an important area to consider. Substituting words in a quotation with synonyms, rearranging the words in a quotation and changing the order of sentences are all examples of plagiarism if references are not provided.

More help on avoiding plagiarism is available from Plagiarism Advice (established by JISC) and the University of Leicester. 

Copyright is an Intellectual Property Right along with Trade Marks, Patents and Designs.  For detailed information, see the IPO's website. UK copyright law is mainly set out in the Copyright, Design and Patents Act (1988), though this has been substantially amended by more recent Acts and European Copyright Directives that aim to harmonise copyright across the EU. 

Copyright gives economic and moral rights to the creators of works, and provides a legal framework for such works to be used fairly by others.

Copyright is infringed where a whole or ‘substantial part’ of a work has been used without permission and no exceptions to copyright apply.  A ‘substantial part’ of a work is not defined in law and may be quite small. 

Copyright for student work

Students at Goldsmiths own copyright in their own work.  Some colleges and universities do make a claim to copyright in student work and ask students to agree to this when they enrol.

MA course work held by the library is non-published work under the CPDA 1988 and no copying is permitted. They are also not available for use by members of the public. MA theses held by the library include a cover sheet which states that no copies can be made and is usually signed by the author. 

PhD theses are made available to both students and members of the public in both print and electronic format, held in the library and on the repositories, Goldsmiths Reasearch Online (GRO) and EThOS. For information on the use of copyright material in PhD theses and the copyright itself of a PhD thesis, see here. 

Further advice on copyright

Advice can be requested from any organisations that represent copyright holders (many also collect royalties on behalf of members). For example, in the following areas: