Referencing and Bibliographies Requirements

Introduction | Quotations and Paraphrasing | Referencing | Bibliographies | Generative-AI Sources

Introduction

Referencing and bibliographies are methods through which we acknowledge the sources of our information in our writing.

Our work as writers and thinkers is to learn from the ideas of others to inform the development of new ideas of our own. But we must not confuse these two things, nor lead our reader to confuse them. So we do present the ideas of others in our papers. But when we do so, we must honour and acknowledge these sources.

Further, showing that we have used reputable source for various ideas and information can help make our argument more convincing.

Also, by indicating our sources to readers, we help them know where to go if they want to study the idea or topic more deeply themselves.

If, on the other hand, we knowingly present the ideas of others as if those ideas were our own, we are being dishonest and are short-changing our potential to develop our own minds. That is, we are guilty of plagiarism, which is a serious academic and intellectual offence.

Legitimately including the ideas of others in our papers involves three parts:

  • Incorporating the idea or information either through a direct quotation or a paraphrase
  • Embedding a reference in our essay to indicate briefly the source of this quotation or paraphrase
  • Putting full details of the source in a bibliography at the end of the paper.

Quotations and Paraphrasing

You can either quote directly from a source, or you can reword or summarise the information using your own words. The latter approach is called paraphrasing.

A paraphrase is quite straightforward — just put your words in your text.

As described below, a quotation is formatted in a particular way to indicate that it is a quotation, differing depending on the length of the quotation.

Whether using a quotation or a paraphrase, you still need to use a reference to show the source.

Quotations General Guidance

  • Do not use quotations just to fill up space. Be extremely selective and critical to ensure your quotation is serving a clear purpose.
  • Explain why the quotation is there. Explicitly link it to your line of thought for the reader. Even though you know what you are trying to demonstrate with the quotation, that does not mean that your reader will understand, unless you explained the relevance of the quote.

Quotations Formatting

  • Quotations must have the full stop after the close of the quote.
  • Do NOT italicise quotes (unless they appear so in original)
  • Use the same font size/type as the rest of your assignment.
  • Always give the author’s exact words, spelling and punctuation. (For example, bold, italics, underlined text or American-English spelling are kept as in original.)

When you quote directly from a source, you present it differently depending on whether it is a long quotation or short quotation, and whether you want to leave out part of the quote or indicate a quote within a quote.

Formatting Short Quotations (fewer than three lines in your text)

  • Just integrate it into your text, using single quotation marks (‘….’ as opposed to “….”).

For example:

On the other hand, George Steiner (1989, p. 30) suggests that ‘Originality is antithetical to novelty’.

Formatting Long Quotations (more than three lines in your text)

  • Put the quote it in a separate paragraph as a ‘block quotation’ by indenting the text the equivalent of two tabs on the left and ideally also on the right.
  • Do NOT use quotation marks for these long quotations (except for quotes within a quote).
  • The block quote always begins on a new line and is generally in single-line spacing.
  • Separate the quotation from the main text with one blank line.
  • Optionally, the quote can be in a smaller font. (For example, Times New Roman 12 can be reduced to Times New Roman 11.)

For example:

Edits of Quotations

  • If you need to omit a word or words from a quotation, indicate this with an ellipsis (three dots …).
  • When omitting longer chunks (such as more than a sentence), use four dots.
  • If you need to add a word of your own or words to a quotation, put them in square brackets.
  • You may add text for clarity, but this must be enclosed in square brackets.

For example:

‘[These] results suggest… that…’

  • When quoting incorrect spelling, punctuation or grammar from an original source, insert [sic] (always square bracketed, straight after the error in the quotation).

For example,

‘…the building inspector estimated that there [sic] house was a fire hazard’ (Wilson 2013, p. 32).

Quote Within a Quote

  • When placing a quote within a quote, use double quotation marks for the inner quotation.

For example,

‘The first words of Melville’s Moby Dick are “Call me Ishmael” and these words are full of significance’ (Johns 1995, p. 43; citing Melville 1892, p. 1).

When you cite somebody else citing another citation, in your bibliography you only include the actual source that you have used (in this example, Johns, not Melville).

Referencing

Always insert a reference in your text to indicate the source of a piece of information, unless that information is common knowledge or very basic factual knowledge.

References are required:

  • to quote (use someone else’s exact words)
  • to copy (use someone else’s figures, tables or illustrations, etc.)
  • to paraphrase (convert someone else’s ideas into your own words)

We require use of the Harvard style (author-date) system of referencing. Other systems will not be accepted.

There are two parts to the Harvard style (author-date) system of referencing:

  • the in-text reference next to the quotation/paraphrase
  • the bibliography entry, which provides more detailed information (as described in the bibliography section, below).

For the in-text reference:

  • Place it in parenthesis near the quotation/paraphrase.
  • Give only the author’s surname, the year of publication, and particular page number(s), using the precise punctuation: (Surname year, page numbers).
  • The author can be left out if the context makes it clear who the author is.
  • The word ‘page’ is abbreviated to ‘p.’ If there are two or more pages, use ‘pp.’ For example (Smith 2012, pp. 12-15). When pages are not in sequence: (Owens 2009, pp. 1, 4, 6).
  • There is no need to include page numbers when summarising the general themes of an entire book/article in your own words.
  • When quoting online material that has no page numbers, use the paragraph number in place of the page number, with the abbreviation para. For example: (Mann 2010, para. 9). It is also acceptable to leave them out if the readers can easily find the quoted material on the website.
  • For references by more than two authors, list the first author’s surname followed by ‘et al.’ [not in italics and always with a full stop at end]. For example: (Smith et al. 2000, p. 4).

Note that the in-text reference is meant to very brief, so as to not clutter the main document. Readers can then follow the reference to the bibliography if they want more details.

Example of direct quote with a standard-format reference:

‘Gender equality in schooling is an aspiration of global social justice’ (Unterhalter 2007, p. 5).

Example of the same direct quote, but with the author provided by the context rather than the reference:

Unterhalter (2007, p. 5) argues that ‘gender equality in schooling is an aspiration of global social justice’.

Example with a paraphrase:

According to Unterhalter (2007, p. 5), equal treatment of the genders in education should be the goal of every just society.

If the context specifies the author and the year, then the reference only needs to show the page (if applicable):

In a 2007 study, Unterhalter declared that equal treatment of the genders in education should be the goal of every just society (p. 5).

When referring to the same source two or more times in a row, rather than repeating author and year, you can use ‘ibid.’ to refer to the previously cited work:

Furthermore, music-information retrieval technologies increasingly rely on AI-learning strategies (ibid., p. 12).

Bibliographies

All resources used during research and/or referred to in the body of the writing must be listed at the end of the assignment. Note that this can include resources that you used to develop your understanding but are not directly referenced in the text. Generally, however, we expect all or the majority of the items in your bibliography to be explicitly referenced from the text.

Each media type has different format details, described below, designed to make the media type clear and provide the information necessary to find the source.

General Approach

  • Start the bibliography on a new page at the end of your document
  • Single-space each entry in the bibliography, with an extra space between each entry. (This makes it much easier to read than if it is all double spaced or all single spaced.)
  • Present the entries in alphabetical order by author’s surname.
    • If a source is authored by an organisation rather than an individual, use the organisation’s name.
    • When listing a source with no author or sponsoring body, list the reference alphabetically according to the title of the article. (However, be wary of the quality of resources that have no identified author. )
    • When listing alphabetically, ignore words such as ‘The’, ‘A’, ‘An’ at the beginning of the reference’s title. (For example, ‘The British Landscape’ should be alphabetised under B’.)
    • If there are two or more sources/references by the same author, list them in order of publication date with the oldest one first. If published in the same year, list them alphabetically according to the title of the book/article and add a lower case letter to the date, both in the in-text reference and in the bibliography. For example: 2007a or 2007b.
  • Give first name(s) in full if possible.
  • Do not insert numbers or bullet points to begin each entry.
  • Each entry must include the following general information. See the sections below for how to format this information according to the media type.
    • name of author (or organisation)
    • year
    • title of publication
      • Use colon between two parts of a title even if it does not appear so on the title-page of the book.
      • The first word in the titles of books, chapters, journal articles and web sites is capitalised, regardless of how it is capitalised in the original title.
    • place of publication [the city, not the country]
      • If the place of publication is little-known, provide the state as well. (For example: North Bend, WA.)
      • If there are other cities with the same name, clarify the location or country. (For example: Cambridge, Massachusetts.)
    • the publisher
  • Provide a full stop at the end of each entry (except when it ends with a weblink).
  • Authors’ names and initials, journal titles and the names of publishers are always capitalised (EXCEPT ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘an’, prepositions such as ‘for’, ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘about’, and conjunctions like ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’. For example: The Journal of Sociology. Music and Letters.

Books

Basic examples:

Salzman, Eric (1974) Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction. 2nd edn. London: Prentice-Hall.

Rossiter, Frank R. (1976) Charles Ives and His America. London: Gollancz.

Shearman, Daniel and Sauer-Thompson, Graham (1997) Green or Gone. Kent Town: Wakefield Press.

For a chapter in book, place the title of article/chapter in single quotes. Page numbers are indicated with ‘pp.’:

Page, Christopher (1980) ‘Polyphony before 1400’ in Brown and Sadie (eds.) Performance Practice: Music Before 1600. London: Macmillan, pp. 79-104.

For a book with an editor, use ‘(ed.)’; for more than one editor use ‘(eds.)’. Note the non-inversion of second editor or author’s name for purposes of alphabetisation:

Nicholls, David (ed.) (2002) The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brown, Howard Mayer, and Stanley Sadie (eds.) (1980) Performance Practice: Music Before 1600. London: Macmillan.

In the case of book that has been translated from another language, indicate the translator as follows:

Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Journal Articles

(Article in an academic journal, whether in-print or electronic)

The title of article is presented in single quotation and the title of the journal must be in italics. Use ‘vol. x’ and ‘no. x’ to indicate the journal’s volume and issue.

Metzer, David (1995) ‘Reclaiming Walt: Marc Blitzstein’s Whitman Settings’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 240-71.

Journal articles only published on the Internet:

Kennedy, Ian (2004) ‘An assessment strategy to help forestall plagiarism problems’, Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–8. Accessed 7 October 2005, http://www.sleid.cqu.edu.au/viewissue.php?id=5/

Article from Conference Proceedings

(A published collection of papers presented at a conference is called the ‘conference proceedings’.) The title of paper is presented in single quotation-marks and the title of conference must be in italics.

Emmerson, Simon (2008) ‘Pulse, metre, rhythm in electro-acoustic music’. In Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network International Conference, pp. 2-7.

Scores

Composer before title. Editor after title. If applicable, series numbering needs to follow the particular series. For editions you need to give publisher since there are often several different editions of a particular composition.

Bach, Johann Sebastian (1966) Konzerte für Violine, für zwei Violinen, für Cembalo, Flöte und Violine (ed.) Dietrich Kilian (Neue Bach-Ausgabe, Ser. VII, vol. 3). Kassel: Bärenreiter.

Recordings

Indicate the media type in square brackets. As always, indicate the publisher and city.

Taverner, John (1995) Western Wind Mass and Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas [CD]. The Tallis Scholars, dir. Peter Phillips. London: Gimell.

Websites

Avoid citing a website unless it is the official page of an artist/group/organisation, etc., or if the information is NOT available ELSEWHERE in books/journal articles. Be extra selective and critical when using websites as a resource.

  • Always indicate the date the website was accessed. This is necessary due to the high frequency with which data on web pages can change.
  • Typically there is no full stop at the end of the entry, due to the weblink being the last component.
  • Most word processors automatically underline the Internet address, which is OK. But remember that all URL references need to be in black font (not blue). If the URL seems too long, you can give the home page for a website rather than the exact address.

Here is a basic example. (Note that the name of the web page is presented in italics. In this example, because the titles Star Wars and the Ring must be normally italicised, but they appear inside an italicised title, they are instead presented in ‘regular’ font.)

Evensen, Kristian (1999) The Star Wars Series and Wagner’s 
Ring. Accessed 22 February 2005, http://www.trell.org/wagner/starwars.html/

Website with no date:

Greenpeace (n.d.) Save Our Tuna. Accessed 7 July 2010, http://www.greenpeace.org/australia/issues/overfishing/our-work/save-our-tuna/

Long web-address shortened:

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2007) Australian Social Trends. Accessed 7 July 2010, http://www.abs.gov.au/

Unpublished Sources and Your Previous Assignments

Avoid unpublished materials if possible. Ask your tutor if in doubt. Useful unpublished materials usually comprise theses, lectures, conference papers and interviews (see below for details). If you want to use material from one of your previous (university and pre-university) assignments, you must ask your tutor for permission to do so.

One such example:

Bannister, John (2010) The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Essay submitted for the module FED8304 Popular Music II, Queens University, Belfast, 21 April.

No Author

If no author is given, cite the title of the article in your in-text reference. If the title is very long, use a shortened form of the title in-text.

Example:

‘Multifaceted Menace’ (2007) Science, vol. 317, no. 5836, pp. 301-304.

Referring to the source in-text:

Studies of these insects have… (‘Multifaceted Menace’ 2007, p. 302).

Magazines and Blogs

Always evaluate very carefully information found in magazines and blogs for ‘scholarliness’ — including bias, validity, trustworthiness of the authors etc. These sources are not generally considered scholarly sources of work for research. However, in Music Technology research, sometimes information can be found in these sources that cannot be found elsewhere.

In bibliography:

McVeigh, Tim (2001) ‘Death Wish’, Australian Magazine, 12-13 May, p. 20.

Referring to the source in-text:

Social workers in Australia have indicated a need to address the issues surrounding the rising suicide rate (McVeigh 2001, p. 20).

Blog example:

The Elegant Variation (2008) ‘The Heat Breaks’, blog post, 23 June. Accessed 7 July 2010, http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2008/06/the-heat-breaks.html/

Newspapers (Article)

You do not have to list newspaper articles in your bibliography. However, they should still be clearly identified in your main text (see the ‘in-text’ examples below). If you choose to include a newspaper article in the bibliography, omit ‘The’ from any newspaper title in your bibliography, but leave ‘The’ in your text.

In bibliography:

Warren, Michael (2007) ‘Kyoto Targets Flouted’, Australian, 21 November, pp. 3-4.

In-text:

Warren (2007, p. 3) reported that ‘…’

When author is unknown, example bibliography entry:

‘Federal Election: New Chip in Politics’ (2001) Advertiser, 23 October, p. 10.

Unknown author, in-text:

In The Advertiser (‘Federal election’ 2001, p. 10),…

Lecture Notes (Unpublished)

Basic example:

Tanri, Ramin (2011) Lecture notes distributed in the course, EDED 4834, C Q University, 21 May.

PowerPoint presentations:

Bell, Samuel (2010) Academic Literacy Skills, PowerPoint presentation, EDED 11406, C Q University, blackboard, http://blackboard.cqu.edu.au/

Film

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2002) motion picture, Warner Bros., New York.

Other Creative Work (Such as Audio-Visual Compositions)

Bok, Jay (2007) Source to Sea, creative work [multimedia]. Accessed 6 May 2012, http://bmrg.cqu.com/

Podcast

Park, John (2007) ‘Banner Design’, Take 5, podcast. Accessed 7 July 2010, http://onlinemedia.cqu.edu.au/podcast/00000016/feed.xml/

Television Broadcast

Heavy Metal (2008) television program, BBC2, London, 22 June.

Software Package

Thomson ResearchSoft (2000) EndNote 9.0.1, computer program, Thomson ResearchSoft, Stamford, Conn.

YouTube, Vimeo and Other Online Streaming Websites

iMindMap (2007) Maximise the Power of Your Brain: Tony Buzan Mind Mapping, video, 8 January. Accessed 24 June 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlabrWv25qQ/

Interview

Norris, Daniel (1997) The Greenhouse Report, radio broadcast, ABC Radio National, 6 January.

If you are the interviewer:

Ranko, Ahmet (2012) interviewed by author, Leicester, 10 February.

WIKI:

The Psychology Wiki (2009) Introduction to Philosophy, wiki. Accessed 7 July 2010, http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Introduction_to_philosophy/

Personal Communication

Conversations, letters and personal email messages are not usually included in the bibliography. More typical is to indicate the source in-text only:

In an email communication on 10 June 2007, the Director of Meticulous Communications, Mary Wren, indicated that…

Thesis (Unpublished)

Because the thesis is unpublished, the title is neither italicised nor in quotation marks.

Wagner, Sam (2004) Derailment Risk Assessment, Masters thesis, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton.

Video Game

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood (standard edition). 2011. Xbox [Game]. Ubisoft: Montreal.

Generative-AI Sources

[March 9, 2023: the following has been established for Music and Audio Tech / MTI modules until De Montfort University establishes an official policy for the whole university.]

‘Generative-AI’ can refer to a wide range of tools and applications that use deep-learning or other advanced artifical-intelligence methods to generate new text, images, music, or other media from user prompts.

Media-Generation in Creative Work

For creative work, use of generative-AI tools must be acknowledged in writeups, as one would for use of other algorithmic tools, large-scale use of third-party samples etc.

Use of Generative Language-AI

Though generative language-AI applications such as the ChatGPT chatbot are powerful, they can also be factually incorrect. They cannot be taken as authoritative sources of information. At most, they could be used as staring points for investigation, to be verified (or challenged) through other, more authoritative, sources. In other words, direct use of information and text from generative-text AI in student written work should be a rare occurrence.

Any use of information or text generated from ChatGPT or similar generative-AI applications must be cited, whether the AI-generated content is directly quoted or paraphrased. Lack of such citation amounts to plagiarism, in that one is presenting the work and ideas of others as if they were one’s own.

Any use of generative AI to generate ideas or plan your research or writing approach must also be acknowledged explicitly, even you do not include direct quotations or paraphrases. In this case, in an appropriate location in your text, cite the AI tool used and how it was used to influence your research and/or writing. In many cases, it will make sense to provide this acknowledgement by adding some sentences after the paper’s conclusion. Check with your tutor to arrive at an agreed solution.

Citation Style

For the in-text citation, indicate the AI source and date accessed:

In contrast to the above approach, the Bing Search Chatbot (5 Mar 2023) gives the following suggestions for microphone choice and placement for recording an acoustic guitar: “Using two matched small-diaphram condenser microphones such as the …

Bibliography Entry

For the bibliography, list the AI source, an indication of the type of AI (in square brackets), URL, and a date last accessed.

Bing Search Chatbot [AI Chatbot] Last accessed 12 March 2023, http: bing.com