BMG871: A Reference Is Necessary To Acknowledge A Piece Of Writing By Another Author: International Business Research Skills Assignments, UCD, Ireland

A reference is necessary to acknowledge a piece of writing by another author which has been referred to or quoted directly. Referencing consists of three parts: the text being referenced, the reference itself, and the corresponding bibliographic entry. The first two will appear in the main body of your dissertation and the third appears at the end in the list of references and the bibliography. The bibliography is a list of literature on a given subject which, in the case of an essay or report, is an alphabetical list of books and journal articles that were read and found relevant to it.

According to Jankowicz (1995, p131), there are a number of reasons for referencing:

• To attribute a quotation.
• To provide justification for a strong statement.
• To tell your reader where an idea comes from.
• To argue for the reasonableness of your methods, since they are as used by other people working in your field.

They are also used to:

• Help you interpret your results.
• Help you build your argument.

There are several systems in use for citing work by other writers and organizing the publication details in a standard format. A modified version of the Harvard system is commonly used and is recommended.

When another writer’s work is referred to in the course of an essay, the author’s name and the date of publication of the work should be included in the body of your work. For example:

Lawton (1983) differentiates between cultural invariants and cultural variables.

or

There are basically two approaches to cultural analysis, namely the classificatory and the interpretive (Lawton, 1983).

If a writer’s work is directly quoted from, the quote, in inverted commas, should be indented on the page and followed by the writer’s name, date of publication of the work, and the page number(s) of the quote. For example:

Evett’s view of motivation in this context underlines the complexities of learning related to needs when she states:

‘It is accepted that theories of need cannot provide overall explanations: not all things are learned because they are relevant to needs. Learning develops its own motivation as we become absorbed in the intricacies of a problem’ (Evett, 1973, 35).

If the same point is mentioned by several authors, authors should be in date order, linked by a semi-colon. For example:

Several authors have criticized Maslow’s concept of needs (Brown, 1972; Smith, 1983; Ashton, 1988).