A SIMPLE GUIDE TO FOLLOW WHEN REFERENCING YOUR WORK

OGUNBANWO SAHEED A.
Dept. of Food Business and Development,
University College Cork,
Cork, Ireland

INTRODUCTION
In Writing academic or research works such as: essay, project and article. There must be a
reference in the course of the work and such is later written at the end of the write-up. In
some works at the end you can see Bibliography or you see References. The fact is that most
people cannot differentiate between a “Reference and Bibliography”. To start with let us see
the difference between Reference and Bibliography. “A Reference” is a work that you
referred to when you are doing your research and it may be inform of a book, a newspaper,
Internet or Magazine. While a “Bibliography” is a list of the references that you consulted
while doing your research or to simply put, A Reference is one item but a bibliography is a
list of items. Therefore in References you only list items you have actually cited while you
list all the materials you have consulted in preparing your essay or project whether or not you
have cited the work in your Bibliography.

HOW TO REFERENCE THE BODY OF YOUR WORK

When you want to reference bear it in mind that you start with the second name of the Author
or the person you are quoting .e.g. a book edited by Robert Briscoe and Michael Ward should
be reference as Briscoe and Ward not Robert and Michael. In the body of your work, there
are a lot of ways to reference for instance if you are quoting somebody directly you can use
this format: Briscoe and Ward (2005:7) state that “co-op prosper in every continent”. Or
It has been stated that “co-op prospers in every continent” (Briscoe and Ward, 2005:7).
But is important to note that if you are only using the idea of Briscoe and Ward but not
quoting them directly, you must still reference them properly (but there will be no quotation
mark and you need not mention the page number) in this case it is better written as,

Research indicates that co-op has proved to be successful in almost every continent (Briscoe
and Ward, 2005). When citing a page number for a quote you may either use “:”or “p”. But
make sure you are consistent with the one you choose to use.

THREE THINGS TO NOTE IN THE ABOVE EXAMPLES

 Note that there must be spacing in between and what follows in this order: bracket,
year, colon, space, page number, and then bracket.
 Note that full stop is what closes the sentence and it comes after the bracket in the
citation when referencing for example (Briscoe and ward, 2005).
 Lastly note that the year and page reference must be kept to the relevant authors.

When dealing with long quotation in your work makes sure you integrate them into the
sentence and keep the quotation to the minimum. You can put quotation marks but if it is
more than 3 lines then indentation should be used with a single space, the margins should be
consistent and you don‟t need to put quotation marks.

WHAT TO DO WHEN QUOTING SOMEBODY IN SECOND HAND FORM

If Briscoe and Ward (2005) directly quote somebody else, e.g. Bernard (1998:123) and you
want to use the quotation then reference it to Bernard, as sourced in Briscoe and Ward e.g.
Bernard (in Briscoe and Ward, 2005:156) claims, “Cooperative approach is better than the
conventional approach”.

It is important to note that if Briscoe and Ward (2005) are the editors of a book and you wish
to use a quote from one of the chapter- writers, e.g. Marry, then you reference Marry because
she wrote the words, not Briscoe and Ward. For example, Marry (2005:67) stresses the need
“for more effective methods of cooperation among cooperatives”.
GETTING THE REFERENCE/ BIBLIOGRAPHY RIGHT
As mentioned earlier the source of your information may be from book, article and internet.
If you are referencing a book, you must put the surname first follow by a comma, then initials
of other name(s), year in brackets, title of book in italics, place of publication and lastly the
publisher. But note that if you are referencing a chapter written by someone in a book, you
are going to give the chapters title in quotes and you will give the page numbers (as per a
journal article). In this respect the Christian initial comes before the surname. For example,
Collins, N. (2004), „Corruption in Nigeria‟, in S. Adebayo and S. Onakuse (eds.), The World
of Corruption, pp. 121-146, Dublin: Falmer press.

If it is an article it is similar at the beginning but there are some differences, so you reference
it like this: Surname first follow by comma, other name(s) initials and year. After that you
put the title of the article in quotes (single quotes preferably), the journal title in italics,
volume and issue details and lastly the pages of article. For example, Murphy, T. and O‟
Callaghan, O. (2002), „Is God a woman?‟ Journal of Theology, Vol.4, No. 3, pp.134-156.

If you are referencing what you have sourced on the Internet you have to follow these steps:
start with the author name you are quoting and follow the way of referencing articles. Make
sure you write the full address of the websites. The reason of putting the full address is for
easy access in case somebody wants to find the article immediately they see it in your
bibliography.

The essential information that should not be missed in your internet referencing is that the
full address should be put in the bibliography and the time and the date you accessed it
should be known as well. At times there may be no apparent author in such situation just
reference it under the name of the organisation which runs the website. For instance if I want
to reference a white paper published by the European Commission, I will do it as follows:

European Commission (2000a) White paper, „Reforming the Commission COM (2000),
http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/off/white/reform/index_en.htm Accessed 20/07/09.
GENERAL RULE FOR BIBLIOGRAPHY:
It must be alphabetical according to the surname of the author. If the reference goes on to the
second line then this line should be indented (i.e. the purpose is that you can read down the
surnames in a straight line to enable you to easily find a specific reference. Each reference
should be single spaced but with a line between each individual entry.

SAMPLES OF A WELL WRITTEN BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahern, A. (2004), what men want and what women expect: a new world perspective, New York:

Macmillan, Conway & Heath.

Bradshaw, C. (1999), The tears game- why certain men do not know how to cry effectively, London:
Pitman.

Briscoe, R and Ward, M. 2005 (eds.), Helping ourselves: success stories in Cooperative Business and
Social Enterprises, Dublin: Oak Tree press.

Born, Branden and Purcell, Mark (2006) , Avoiding the Local Trap: Scale and Food Systems in
Planning and Research, Journal of planning Education and Research. 26, 195.

Collins, N. (1987), Local Government Managers at Work, Dublin: Institute of Public Administration.

Denters, B. and Rose, L. E. (eds.) (2005), Comparing Local Governance: Trends and Development,
Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Department of Agriculture and Food (2007), Organic Farming Action Plan 2008-12.Accessed
17/12/08 at: http://www.agriculture.gov.ie/organics/OrganicFarmingActionPlan.pdf.

Hassanein, Neva (2003),”Practising food democracy: a pragmatic politics of transformation”. Journal

0f Rural Studies, 19, 77-86.