Hello. Welcome back to our EAP course.
In this section, we are going to focus on
"how to avoid plagiarism by acknowledging sources?"
First you may wonder: what does it mean by acknowledging sources?
Well, if you have made use of one of the three ways
(i.e. quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing)
to cite others' work or ideas,
it is necessary to immediately show your credit to the source.
The source can be a book, an article, a government document, a website, etc.
To acknowledge sources, in particular, you have to do two things:
First, directly point out that those words or ideas are from someone else,
second, you also provide detailed information about the source,
like the author's name, the publishing year,
the title of the cited article, etc.
By acknowledging the source, you can avoid plagiarism.
How well that you acknowledge your sources determines your credibility
as a writer and the reception your writing will receive from readers.
Then how to acknowledge sources?
The act to show your credit to the source is called referencing.
There are two types of referencing:
one is in-text referencing,
and the other is end-text referencing.
Providing brief information about a source in the essay,
usually next to a quotation, paraphrase or summary,
is known as in-text referencing.
End-text referencing is to provide detailed and complete information
about the source at the end of your essay.
You are going to learn about these two types of referencing in this lecture.
Let's first look at the different referencing styles in the academic world.
In order to avoid plagiarism,
you have to use referencing to acknowledge a source which you have cited.
There are different systems/styles of referencing
in the academic publishing all over the world.
As shown in the following table,
each discipline has their preferred referencing style.
For example, MLA style is preferred
in the disciplines of language, literature and humanities,
and APA style is preferred in social sciences, education, engineering and business.
Therefore, you need to get acquainted with the citation
and referencing system often used in your discipline.
Always consult your instructor about which referencing style he/she requires
when doing the written assignment.
In this section,
you will learn about the basic rules or guidelines of referencing
published by APA, or say APA style
(one of the most widely used documentation systems in the world).
You may visit its official website
http://www.apastyle.org/ for more specific information.
Now, let's focus on in-text referencing.
In academic writing, if you paraphrase or summarize another author's words,
you need to mention his/her last name (i.e. family name)
and the year of publication before or after the cited information
according to the different focus.
When you focus on the authority of the source information,
you should use the original author's name as the subject of the sentence,
with a reporting verb introducing the cited information.
Such as:
Walker (2003) maintains that there are commercial and political reasons
for high-density living in large and small cities.
If the focus is the cited information,
the author's name and the year are placed in brackets
after the paraphrase or summary (it is called parenthetical format).
For example:
There are commercial and political reasons for high-density living
in large and small cities (Walker, 2003).
Sometimes there is more than one author
involved in paraphrasing or summarizing.
The rules of in-text referencing in such cases are more complicated
(as illustrated in this table),
so you need to pay special attention to the details when referencing.
Take a look at this table,
I want to call your attention that
when you are citing a work with three or more authors,
the first time you reference it in the text,
you need to provide all the authors' name.
In the following references,
you only need to mention the first author's name,
and use et al. to refer to other authors.
When using parenthetical format,
use the symbol "&" to replace the word "and".
If you directly quote words or sentences from a source,
besides giving the author's name and the year,
you also need to provide the page number(s)
indicating the exact place of the quoted words in the original work.
Note that "p."/"pp." is short for the word "page".
If one page is involved, use "p.".
If two or more pages are involved, use "pp.".
Let's look at two examples.
1. Francisco (2003, p. 12) explained that the objective of their program
was to "provide examples of correction of urban mistakes"
made in past urban development.
In this example, the author's name is used as the subject of the sentence,
the publication year and page number are put in the brackets.
Here "p." is short for the word "page" when only one page is involved.
2. The objective of this program
was to "provide examples of correction of urban mistakes"
made in past urban development (Francisco, 2003, p. 12).
In this example, the author's name, the year,
and the page number are all put in the brackets at the end of the sentence
to emphasize the quoted information.
When the quoted work has more than one author,
you can refer to the referencing formats
illustrated in the table on the previous slide.
Now, let's focus on the other type of referencing: end-text referencing.
For each in-text reference,
there should be a matching entry (条目) in the Reference list
placed at the end of the writing.
For instance, if you have paraphrased from Smith (1984) in the text,
you need to provide detailed information about this source
at the end of your text like this:
Smith, W. S. (1984).
Mass transport for high-rise high-density living.
Journal of Transportation Engineering, 110, 521–535.
This example is the end-text reference of a journal article.
The first information provided is the last name of the author,
then the initials of his first name and middle name.
The year in the brackets is the year of publication of this journal article.
Then the titles of the article and the journal are given subsequently,
followed by the issue number of this journal.
At the end, the page numbers of the cited words are provided.
Generally speaking, for all types of sources,
whether it is a book, a journal article or a website,
you need to provide information on four basic components
in the end-text references:
Author name(s), publication date/year,
title of the work, publication information.
The following examples illustrate the referencing format of different types of sources:
You can give your end-text references by following these formats carefully.
Finally, you have to arrange all the entries in the Reference list
in alphabetical order according to the first author's last name.
Finally, let's have a quick review of what we have learnt in this lecture.
We mainly introduced two types of referencing of the APA style.
They are in-text referencing and end-text referencing.
Hope you can learn to use these two types of referencing appropriately
in your academic writing to help you avoid plagiarism.
Thank you for joining us.
See you next time!