Signposts to Referencing for Students of St John’s College

Referencing and citing
These terms refer to the ways you acknowledge other people’s ideas when you use them in your assignments. This may involve putting the author’s name in parentheses after you’ve borrowed their ideas for example: (Stanton, 2002), or inserting a footnote the bottom of the page , then compiling a list of all the resources that you have consulted at the end of your assignment. The way that your reference is set out will depend on which style guide you are using. Your list must be consistent and accurate in layout. Our sample resource might look like this in your bibliography if you are using the Chicago style of referencing:

Stanton, Graham. The gospels and Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Using your references, your marker should be able to find the exact page in Stanton’s book where you found the idea you are expressing in your assignment.

There are different layouts, or styles, for referencing. You need to use the correct style as specified for your course.

Style guides
A style guide is a book giving detailed advice on how to cite sources. There are rules on how to cite different kinds of resources, for example, an edited book, an article, a website, a conversation and a sacred text such as the Bible or the Koran.

Plagiarising
If you use other peoples’ work without acknowledging them by name you are plagiarising, that is, presenting someone else’s ideas without acknowledgement, as if they are your own. Besides being dishonest, plagiarism usually results in severe penalties by your marker. So it is important to note where your ideas came from.

Endnote and Zotero are both software programs which help you manage references. Microsoft Word 2007 has referencing help built in. Click on the References tab to find this.

Anglican Studies Programme students are required to use Chicago 15A style. Here are several links to useful information on this style:

http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ssah/useits/chicago15A_useit.pdf

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/turabian/turabian_citationguide.html

http://library.bowdoin.edu/1st/docs/chicago.pdf

The full version of The Chicago manual of style and A manual for writers of research papers, theses and dissertations by Kate L. Turabian (often called by the author’s name, Turabian) are both in the Reference section under LB 2369.

Auckland University students should follow this link and choose the theology option.

Otago university students can use the information found on this page.