The Lighthouse

Last week we covered student questions about assignments and exams. This week we address the top referencing questions from the Academic Q+A forum.

Two of our most common questions already have their own blog posts:

• There’s a citation inside my source – how do I reference it?
• How do I reference a journal article I found online?

Today, we answer seven more:

• I cite the same source a lot; do I have to include the full citation every time?
• How do I cite this PDF? What about government documents?
• How do I reference lecture notes, slides, and material from Stream?
• How do I reference the Treaty of Waitangi?
• How do I reference two sources that have the same author and year?
• How many references should I have in my assignment?
• Should I use Microsoft Word’s referencing tool?

Unless otherwise stated, our answers use APA style.

1. I cite the same source a lot; do I have to include the full citation every time?

In APA style, you can sometimes skip parts of the citation if you cite a source over and over. This option comes from the OWLL page on APA in-text citations.

Sometimes you need to go into more detail about one particular source. Putting an in-text citation after every sentence that comes from that source would look awful and break the flow of your writing… but leaving the in-text citations out risks plagiarism.

Introduce the source early in the paragraph, with the author as part of the sentence rather than in brackets:

For the rest of the paragraph, you can refer back to the author by name or pronoun when elaborating on their ideas:

As long as it is clear to the reader that all of the ideas come from that same source, there is no risk of plagiarism and the paragraph flows well.

Note that if you put the author’s name in brackets later on in the paragraph (for example, if you include a quotation from that source) you should always include the year of publication in the brackets.

2. How do I cite this PDF? What about government documents?

A PDF that you have found online is often the digital version of some other source type. For example, it might be a journal article, e-book, or the proceedings of a conference.

As you get experience in referencing, you will recognise markers for these specific document types. Journal articles will usually mention a journal name and volume number in the header or footer of each page. E-books will have the same title page and/or copyright page as a print book. Conference proceedings will use a word like “conference” or “symposium” near the front of the document.

If you can identify a specific type, then you should reference the source according to that type. If the document doesn’t seem to be a digital version of something else, then you should use the format for generic online documents. This is the APA reference list format:

Often PDFs won’t identify a single person as the author. Instead, they will give the name of an organisation, a company, or a government department. It’s okay to use that name in the author position instead:

• Group authors in APA

If the year of publication is missing, then “n.d.” is used instead:

• No year of publication in APA

3. How do I reference lecture notes, slides, and material from Stream?

Our advice is to avoid citing the lecturer themselves if possible. Lecturers usually expect that you will find authoritative and independent sources to support your points – in other words, it is better to research further and get a broader picture of the topic.

There are two exceptions.

A. The lecturer has provided outside material as part of the course materials. In that case, you can just reference it according to its type (as a journal article, for example).

B. The lecturer has specifically said that it’s okay to cite their lecture material. If they have, use these default formats:

Printed material

Online material

If the material doesn’t identify an author, you can use the name of the department or school instead.

APA style does not use URLs that are behind a paywall or login. This includes pages inside Stream, as they are only available to students and staff of Massey University. For the URL, use the (publically available) front page http://stream.massey.ac.nz instead.

4. How do I reference the Treaty of Waitangi?

APA does not give a specific format for historical documents, so the easiest approach is to cite the source that contains the document. In other words, if you are using a copy of the treaty reproduced in a textbook, name the treaty in-text and then cite and reference the textbook instead:

If you are using an online reproduction of the treaty, cite the webpage:

And add an entry for it in the reference list:

5. How do I reference two sources that have the same author and year?

If two sources have been written by the same person and published in the same year, then you can distinguish them by putting a lowercase letter after the year:

Those letters also appear in the reference list:

6. How many references should I have in my assignment?

How long is a piece of string?

I have never seen a lecturer give a precise number here – and the number would vary a lot depending on your discipline anyway. Having read a lot of student assignments, I can say that the amount of research students do within even a single paper varies as well.

The most common answer is this: add as many references as you can, as long as you don’t lose your own ‘voice’ within the writing. You might spend one paragraph working with a foundational or influential source in some detail; another paragraph might use passing mentions of four or five sources while it explores a particular sub-topic.

The important thing is to ensure that every claim in your writing is supported by either logical argument, direct research evidence, or by a citation (which, ideally, leads to logical arguments and research evidence in your sources). In other words, you’re aiming to avoid the dreaded “says who?” feedback.

Also, you’ll be researching and reading sources at the same time as you are planning and writing the essay. Lecturers often provide some initial readings (and recommend some more readings), and once you have a basic structure in mind it will be more obvious how much more reading and citing you need to do – to fill those gaps and ensure that the essay is convincing.

7. Should I use Microsoft Word’s referencing tool?

I’ve seen quite a few assignments that use Word’s reference manager. Overall, I think it can be a real time-saver. However, a lot of those assignments end up with referencing errors anyway:

• Errors in title capitalization
• Countries or states entered instead of cities
• Missing elements (e.g. no publication location, no publisher, no volume number)
• Extra elements (e.g. institutional sponsors, full dates for journal articles rather than just the year)
• Group authors treated like individual authors (e.g. Ministry of Education becomes Education, M. O.)
• Citations in which the author appears inside the brackets when they shouldn’t (e.g. According to (Jones, 2012) the correct…)

In many cases it is possible to fix these problems within the program itself, by keeping an eye on the quality of your input data. However, in order to do so you need to know the rules in the first place.

If you’re already familiar with referencing conventions, then it works well. If you’re unsure of the correct format, I would not rely on the software to work it out for you. In other words, it’s a useful manager but a terrible teacher.

For more on referencing software, see this page on the Massey library website:

• Referencing software

One response to “Best of Academic Q+A, Part 2”

1. Barbara Linton says:

   August 17, 2018 at 10:52 am

   Hi there, “APA Interactive” is coming up with an error message. has this service been removed? or will it be fixed soon? THX, Barb

   Reply