Referencing consists of acknowledging the sources you have used in your work. There are two elements to referencing: the citation in the text and the reference at the end of the document in an organised list.
The in-text citation
You will use an in-text citation to show that you are referring to a source and this will often appear in brackets.
For example:
It has been argued that case studies are a sound means of developing research theory (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007).
The reference
The reference gives full details of the source which has been cited to allow the reader to locate the source if they wanted to follow it up.
For example:
Eisenhardt, K. M., and Graebner, M. E. (2007). Theory building from cases: Opportunities and challenges. Academy of Management Journal, 50(1), pp. 25–32. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2007.24160888
Usually you list the references in a reference section at the end of the document.
Referencing styles
The way you format citations and references and the order of the bits of information they contain (title, author, date, etc...) is determined by convention in each university or discipline. This means you may have to re-format existing citations and references.
At BCU, we primarily use a variant of the Harvard style and some disciplines use a style that is specific to them. To learn about how to reference different types of sources in the appropriate format, consult the Referencing Guide.
