Hi guys, in this article I am going to show you the correct way to put references for your end-term paper or any other research project.
Referencing is the action by which you tell your supposed reader about the sources you used to build your research, and they can be a book, journal article, a website... For example if you got any kind of external data that is important for the reader to examine you will need to tell him/her where you got that data.
Referencing, then, is a kind of argument you need in order to convince others about your views or findings and make your research look appear more academic and professional. For instance you might write a quote such as "Noam Chomsky pointed that languages share what he called [Universal Grammar]"
However, what you should know is that referencing should not be arbitrary but it follows general guidelines made by some well known organizations like APA (American Psychological Association); which is the one I am going to use in this post. APA has published a book entitled "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association" (7th Edition), and you can download it from the internet. This books details all what you need to know on formatting publications like scientific articles, research, books, magazines...etc.
In this post I am going to give examples of how to reference a book, a journal article, a newspaper articles and content from a website according to APA style, which is the most recommended, and I personally edited -along with classmates- our end term paper following the APA format (you can download and our research of 2020 here).
Format to reference a book:
For a basic format, you are going to need the surname and first letter of first first name and middle name if exists, date of publication and the publisher name.
Here is an example, let's suppose we quoted from the book "Sociolinguistics", about this book we know this information:
Author: Richard Anthony Hudson
Date of publication: 1996
Title: Sociolinguistics
Edition: 2nd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press.
And we are going to reference it this way:
Hudson, R. A. (1996). Sociolinguistics (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Notice that we start with: Author's surname > comma (,) > first letter of first name and middle name (if exists) > date of publication between round brackets > period (.) > Title of the book in Italics > (edition) > period (.) > The publisher.
Now you might ask, what if we have a book with more than one author ? How to reference it?
We simply write the authors in the same format as one author and combine them with comma (,) and & symbol.
For example if we have two authors: Richard Anthony Hudson, and Avram Noam Chomsky
We reference their names this way:
Hudson, R. A. & Chomsky, A. N. (Year) ....
If we have 3 authors:
Hudson, R. A., Chomsky, A. N. & Fishman, J. (Year) ...
How to reference an article from a journal
Journals are periodical and they are usually published weekly or monthly, and embed academic and scientific studies and opinion. You might read an interesting study on some phenomenon and you want to rely on some part of it in your research, and in order to avoid plagiarism, you need to reference it an in-text citation and in the section that you dedicate to references.
It's the same as referencing a book with minor differences:
Author's last name, First initial., Second Initial. if exists. (year). Title: Subtitle. Name of journal, volume number (issue number if exists), First page - last page. DOI (if exists)
DOI is an abbreviation that stands for: Digital Object Identifier, and it's a unique number assigned for numeric content in the internet and registered in the site https://doi.org in the format https://doi.org/code
example:
Ennaji, M. (1995). A Syntacto-semantic study of the language of news in Morocco. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 112, 97-117
And it is and article by Moha Ennaji in 1995 and published in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language.