Why are you being asked to reference other people’s work in your writing?

Perhaps the main reason that you are asked to use references is that academic work (and a great deal of modern knowledge) relies on the idea that you can build on the insights and research of others. In an essay, report or dissertation you are using the theories and writing of others as building blocks or scaffolding for your argument – as all academic writers do. These sources or references can allow you to assume or state ideas that experts have worked on for years and so potentially let you build powerful and insightful arguments of your own with their backing. Alternately some of your writing will engage with important ideas to critique them and some of your work will use logic and evidence to undermine ideas you oppose. This is something that academics do in ongoing debates on many subjects – you are being asked to take part. Either way (through support and/or critique) the idea is that by engaging with ideas from the best thinkers you will be able to develop your understanding of a subject and be able to apply that to develop insights of your own.

To put this in a slightly different way, one important reason to use academic reference material to support an argument is because in the process of being published it has had to go through some quite rigorous scrutiny. This does not mean that it is necessarily correct. However, because of this scrutiny it can to a greater or lesser extent be defended and is generally based on evidence and logical argument. It therefore puts your writing on much firmer foundations than simply stating your own view. However, such references must be used carefully. They can be defended because they are put in a particular and exact way. Understanding this exactness and getting your head around the particular point is required so that you can effectively use the quote or reference in your own work. This is a key element of grasping your subject.

Sometimes the demand to use references is interpreted as being a little dismissive of your own insights, thoughts and ideas. In a sense that is true. You have not been published in twelve languages and been invited to speak at conferences around the world because people are excited by your ideas. Your ideas have not been tested by experts critiquing them. However in another sense this is false. You are being taken seriously in the competition of ideas. You are being asked to apply your abilities and understanding in the most rigorous way possible, up against (and with) the best ideas mankind has to offer. The idea is that you will thoroughly test your own views and that of others and emerge with a much stronger and clearer understanding.

The view of connected knowledge also strongly influences how your work is assessed. You are being assessed in large part on your ability to interact with the best ideas. So you must let assessors know what ideas you are using in references. They need to check you have understood correctly, applied that understanding correctly, and they must see clearly what you are dealing with. Your work is understood as better, not worse, by taking into account what others have written. However, you are not simply copying what others say. Rather you are being asked to apply your own understanding aided by the insights of others to answer a particular enquiry or question. Thus, for example, listing a set of quotes with a little explanation could never be enough.

Make no mistake: this is not easy. Students struggle to understand many ideas precisely because the ideas themselves required a struggle to get to. Rarely are profound insights straightforward: they often require an unusual way of looking at things or are set out specifically in relation to particular sets of circumstances and evidence, and with qualifications about how they can be applied. This is then why such a dim view is taken of using the writing of others as if it were your own – of plagiarism. Plagiarism is a way of attempting to shortcut the struggle to understand. It is you taking credit for the work of others by presenting their worked-through-understanding as though it were your own.

So, are you being asked to be an intellectual? Some students will decide that this is the way to go. However at a base level you are being asked to develop a rounded appreciation of your subject. By getting to grips with the ideas that others have used to understand this subject you will be well placed to thoroughly engage with the subject and apply that understanding yourself. This is the “shortcut” that higher education gives you. And this is done through writing. Writing makes you actively apply yourself in a way that simply reading can never quite do.

What works should you reference?

The choice of sources you use, and the works that you reference, in many ways determines the quality of your written work. A useful analogy here is cooking. Even if you are a good chef if you use poor quality ingredients then your food will be of poor quality. Likewise if you choose poor sources (and by implication do limited research) then your written work will be of poor quality. To extend the analogy, of course some of the better ingredients/sources require skill to be used well but without the attempt you will never be an accomplished cook/student.

The first works you must consider referencing are those set out in the course reading. For any given topic there will be hundreds if not thousands of examples of writing that might be relevant for you to read and use. However a few of these will definitely be essential. You should expect that your lectures and the set reading for your course will provide a guide to some of the key authors and debates you need to engage with. Some the course reading will be background that helps you understand and you won’t reference it. However, as a rule of thumb you will be expected to directly reference some of the works on the reading list. This shows an engagement with the course.

Additionally you will are expected to engage with the relevant topics, discussions and authors discussed in the core reading. This raises the second source of works to look at, which are to be found in the references found in the course reading. The academic idea is that a work will have references to other works. You can branch out from the core texts to references found there or to the works of key writers found there. Using references in this way as places to go and look, as a way to broaden and deepen your research and understanding, is similar to the idea of following links from a web page. This intellectual exploration is a key aspect of your work and should be applied to all the research and reading that you do.

The third source of material is academic sources more generally. Primarily these will likely be discovered through a combination of using a library search and by using the Google Scholar search engine (more later). To find this material you must establish some search terms that will allow you to find relevant material. The idea is that you must strike a balance between search terms that are too general and too specific (again covered later). You should save these search terms and collect key material as you go along, either by saving PDF documents or else by saving links or references in a document. However a secondary way to find material is using the indexing of the Dewey-decimal system. Each library book you look at has a number on the spine, e.g. 031.231. These are subject groupings used in the library. Often a few hours will be well spent looking at surrounding books.

The last stop, unless you are conducting your own direct research of experimental data or perhaps of opinions, is with journalistic material. It should be noted here that despite being last on the list sometimes journalistic material can be more useful for your research than many academic sources. Sometimes, for example, you want to establish a factual point or need very current material. At other times you need to find material that is from a particular perspective not covered in straightforward academic material that perhaps has a particular attitude and vitality. Notably journalistic material covers an enormous variety of sources some of which is more valuable than others.

To use journalistic material properly you need to think about the source represents, the seriousness of the argument being put forward and why a particular point is being made. Generally the more serious and more representative the better. And thinking about why a point is being made (the intention of the writer) lets you decide how you will present an argument – sometimes explaining the background or interests involved will be necessary to explain for the reader and to construct your argument. While in some ways these criteria also apply to academic sources, you need to think quite carefully about this when it comes to journalistic sources. There are several resources you should consider. There are several specialist magazines (both offline and online) than can be useful. For example in current affairs, the Economist, the Spectator, and the New Statesman all cover important debates and contemporary events from particular perspectives. There are also the broadsheet newspapers – such as the Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph – all of which have important source material that works its way into many academic accounts. This source material can be useful both for facts and opinion.  There are also some important blogs that academic authors and some influential writers use to develop ideas not yet ready for institutional publication.