IEEE Referencing

Correct citation and referencing:

• help you remember where you found that useful photo/quote/piece of information, which saves time,
• are required for all assignments
• shows the depth of your research
• are required under copyright law, which Box Hill Institute expects you to comply with
• shows your teacher what is your work and what is supporting material you have drawn from external sources
• lets readers locate the source you have used.

Are you using someone else's words, ideas or information? Insert an in-text reference whenever you:

• paraphrase someone else's ideas in your own words
• summarise someone else's ideas in your own words
• quote someone else's ideas in their exact words

You are required to acknowledge the work of others any time that you use it in your work. This applies no matter what the source of the material is; you must provide references for material from books, journals, websites, emails, conversations, DVDs and any other sources you have used. This applies whether the information used is factual in basis (statistics, figures, graphs, tables etc) or based on someone’s opinion. 

 Providing references to your source material allows your teacher to see that you have genuinely researched your assignment and based the content on quality information sources.  If you do not provide references when you use other’s materials, this is called plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious offence, and can get you into trouble with your teacher, course or even the law.

You must supply references both when you use an exact quotation, and when you put the information into your own words.

The only exception to this is when you refer to ‘common knowledge’. Information is common knowledge if it is both generally known and not open to interpretation. For example, you would not need to provide a reference if you say that Bill Gates and Paul Allen were the founders of Microsoft, as this is widely known. However, you would need to provide a reference if you say that ‘Gates has become the most powerful — and feared — player in the computer industry’ [1] as this is an opinion, rather than a fact. If you are in doubt as to whether information is common knowledge or not, it is best to cite it and add it to your reference list.

Reference

[1] J. Wallace and J. Erickson, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. New York: Harper Business, 1993.

“What is Plagiarism”, by F. Pirillo, Creative Commons

Plagiarism is the intentional, or unintentional use of the work of someone else without proper acknowledgement.

This includes:

• copying or cutting and pasting material from books, periodicals, electronic resources, journals, study notes, the web, or any other source in an unchanged form and without acknowledgement
• copying the work of other students
• paraphrasing ideas from any work without acknowledgement
• collaborating with other students without authorisation when producing an assessment task.

To avoid plagiarism:

• write down  the source details from any document or work that use so you can refer to it later, and you know where your information has come from. For example journal name, web address and page numbers.
• Write source notes on any printout or copy that you make. 
• Use quotation marks if you quote directly from a work. It is not enough just to acknowlege the source.
• Use your own words and ideas, as well as some paraphrasing. Limit quotes to really important pieces of information, or facts and figures.
• Acknowledge all sources of information from which you have extracted or developed ideas for use in an assessment, even if you have put those ideas into your own words. It's still someone else's idea.