Citing is a key academic practice.
A correct reference:
All intellectual content owned by third parties is subject to copyright rules, regardless of the form (paper or digital) or the type of publication (volume, article, doctoral thesis, papers). Failure to comply with this principle is potentially plagiarism.
Plagiarism occurs when you present someone else's work as your own, copying or paraphrasing words or ideas without acknowledging the source or misquoting it.
Plagiarism is often not intentional, but the result of superficiality.
You risk committing plagiarism if:
Institutions use plagiarism checker software to measure the level of originality of your work. For example, Turnitin is used at the University of Torino.
To avoid the risk of plagiarism, when you write any paper (report, term paper, degree thesis) you must correctly indicate the bibliographic references to clarify the sources you have used in your work.
A bibliographic reference consists of two parts:
Citations are also important because they allow the reader to see which sources you based your argument on and allow you to give due recognition to your sources, avoiding plagiarism.
Quotations must always be made regardless of the format of the source and the form (direct or paraphrased) in which you report it. Only for ideas that are a common heritage of knowledge (e.g. dates and irrefutable historical facts), it is not necessary to indicate bibliographic references.
Don't be afraid that including too many citations will make your work unoriginal and derivative. Indeed originality comes from understanding, interpreting and using what you read and references are needed to support or counter your claims. It doesn't matter how many there are, just make sure that every quote is discussed. A good article presents a balanced mix of claims, evidence, and analysis.
You must provide a citation whenever you refer to an idea derived from a source. The citation style you choose determines what information to include in citations and affects as well their order and placement.
Quotations can be direct or indirect:
In both cases, the reference to the reproduced work is mandatory. You can choose to insert bibliographic references directly in the text or indicate them in footnotes. All documents must also be cited in the bibliographic references at the end of the thesis.
Direct quotes display text between quotation marks in the exact original form.
Example:
as Annibaldi maintains (Annibaldi-Berta, 1999, 2, 131), «the investigations into the CIG and its consequences were only one of the many themes on which social research was carried out in Turin in the 1980s».
The source of the citation can be displayed in brackets in the text, as in the example proposed (American usage), or it can be displayed as a footnote.
If you choose to quote it according to the American usage, all the additional elements of the cross-reference will be given in the final bibliography.
If, on the other hand, you choose to place it at the foot of the page, the complete bibliographic reference will be inserted in the note and the abbreviation cit. will be used in subsequent citations.
They are normally reported in the body of the text in smaller font, with single line spacing and wider margins.
Rendering someone else's speech in your own words is called paraphrasing. As a rule, it is not a single sentence that is paraphrased, but an entire paragraph or even longer sentences. In this case the bibliographic reference is required as well, but the number of pages may not be specified.
In citations you must make available all the information necessary to make the document recognizable (and traceable) without ambiguity, but in the most concentrated form possible. The fundamental elements common to the citation of any type of document, both on fixed support (paper or digital) and on online electronic support are:
Please note:
«Recycling» on www.britannica.com (last visit 27/01/2017)
Bustreo M. (2015). Tesi di laurea step by step. La guida per progettare, scrivere e argomentare prove finali e scritti professionali senza stress. Milano, Hoepli (+ number of the page of what you are quoting).
Piva F. (2008). Storia di Leda. Da bracciante a dirigente di partito. Milano, Franco Angeli (+ number of the page of what you are quoting).
Pay attention: in the final bibliography page numbers are omitted.
Cereseto G., Frisone A., Varlese L. (2009). Non è un gioco da ragazze. Femminismo e sindacato: i Coordinamenti donne Flm, Roma, Ediesse (+ number of the page of what you are quoting).
Pay attention: in the final bibliography page numbers are omitted.
Fuori l’italiano dall’università? Inglese, internazionalizzazione, politica linguistica (2013). A cura di N. Maraschio e D. De Martino, Bari, Laterza (+ number of the page of what you are quoting).
Pay attention: in the final bibliography page numbers are omitted.
Testa A., Inglese all’Università: tra sogno e nightmare, in Fuori l’italiano dall’università? Inglese, internazionalizzazione, politica linguistica (2012). A cura di N. Maraschio e D. De Martino, Bari, Laterza (+ number of the page of what you are quoting).
Pay attention: in the final bibliography page numbers are omitted.
Balbo L. (1973), Le condizioni strutturali della vita familiare, in “Inchiesta”, a. 3, n. 9 (gennaio- marzo 1973) (+ number of the page of what you are quoting).
Pay attention: in the final bibliography you must put pages of the whole article (in this case: pp. 11-17).
The same rules apply as for printed articles, even if the page numbers are sometimes missing, adding the URL of the periodical or possibly the DOI, i.e. the code that makes the document unambiguously recognizable on the web.
Dowling E. (2017). In the wake of austerity: social impact bonds and the financialization of the welfare state in Britain, in “New Political Economy”, Vol. 22, n. 3, DOI 10.1080/13563467.2017.1232709
DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a string that provides a permanent link to locate the document online. You often find it in the article header or in its related metadata. If the DOI is not available you can use its URL.
Cappellini, B. (2009). The sacrifice of re-use: the travels of leftovers and family relations. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 8(6), 365–375. https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.299
Learn to use the DOI Citation Formatter!
In addition to providing the URL in its most stable component, it is necessary to indicate the date on which the site was visited.
FAO - www.fao.org (last visit on 27/10/2020)
All documents listed in your bibliography must be described in a single, consistent citation style. If you capture citations from different sources, you will have to adapt them to the chosen style, unless you use citation management software (such as Zotero), which does this automatically.
There are many citation styles. The disciplinary area of Social Sciences (Economics, Communication Sciences) favors the author-data style (e.g. APA). APA provides a citation engine.
The chosen style influences:
Many search tools (for example our discovery tool Eureka) allow you to export the citation in a specific citation style (see the image at the side. Click to elarge it).
Many students think that the distinction between a bibliography and a webliography depends on the support of the documents they cite. For this reason, they include paper documents in their bibliographies and online documents in their webliography.
This is not correct: if you read an article published in the “American Journal of Agricultural Economics”, October 2017, v. 99, issue 5, pp. 1159-71, it doesn't matter if you are reading the printed or digital version. The scientific thesis of the article is identical in both cases and will in any case be cited in the bibliography. At most, if you are reading the online version, you can give the DOI.
What you have to cite in the webliography is something else, i.e. websites that cover a certain topic as a whole.
RMS (Reference Management Systems) are software aimed at managing bibliographic references.
They allow to:
However:
On the web you find many RMS such as Endnotes, Mendeley, Zotero, RefWorks, etc… Some are free, some commercial and some hybrid.
At BEM we promote the use of Zotero, because
Zotero consists of the following 3 components:
You can learn how to use Zotero independently, following the advice of one of the many videos you find on youtube or follow one of the dedicated BEM courses.