ABSTRACT
Excellent academic written work is littered with research evidence, as discussed in the previous chapter. Referencing and citing others’ work (along with primary legal sources such as legislation and cases) is one way of demonstrating your scholarly research skills. It demonstrates the wealth of material that you have found during your research phase. It also provides authority and weight to your arguments and allows you to justify your points and to persuade the reader or marker that your analysis is robust. In short, it is a very good thing. Some students think it is better to pretend that they have come up with an idea than to show that they have got the idea from something they have read. In fact, the opposite is true. Excellent work proudly shows off the sources that have been used in the writing process. In contrast, poor work provides few sources, but instead claims originality. Few academics will come up with a new original theory in their lifetime, and so we hardly expect undergraduates to do so. Even if you do manage to come up with a new theory, we will still expect it to be built on solid (research) foundations. In this chapter we shall address the nuts and bolts of how to reference or cite others’ work. But fi rst we shall deal with a related issue: quoting and paraphrasing.
