Correct referencing

What is referencing?

Referencing is the process whereby all sources of information and ideas from others that have been used in the Extended Essay are acknowledged in a standardised way so that their source is uniquely identified. This includes facts and figures, direct quotations and ideas, methods and theories that have been taken from both published (whether in print or online) and unpublished works (for example personal communications).

There are many different acceptable styles of referencing (see Writing a bibliography). The IB does not insist on any one particular style but the style used throughout the Extended Essay should be the same. There is a section on referencing in the Extended Essay Guide and the IB has published a separate booklet titled 'Effective citing and referencing' (available to download from the resources section in My IB) which is well worth consulting.

Referencing is important as:

           It avoids plagiarism.

           Information can be verified from its source.

           An interested reader can follow up the reference to read more.

It is important to record all necessary information when referencing a source. Different types of sources require different information. For example for a book, the author/editor, title, year of publication and publisher are required for the bibliography. For the citation within the Extended Essay the page number(s) is/are also required. For electronic information such as a web page the web address and the date it was accessed should also be included.

Within the text of the body of the Extended Essay  a citation should be made in the appropriate place whenever an external source is used. There are various ways in which this can be done. These include for example:

Putting the author(s) name(s) in brackets with the page number.

Using a superscript number and then adding the publication and page number at the bottom of the page as a footnote to correspond with thesuperscript number.  

At the end of the Extended Essay a list of all the cited sources should be included. Technically this is called a Reference List. For the IB it is sufficient to include all these in the Bibliography rather than produce a separate reference list. A bibliography contains all the sources used to research the Extended Essay whether extracts from them were cited or not and may also include a few other sources which could be of interest to the reader.

Useful sites 

Curtin University in Australia has produced one of the clearest sites detailing how to reference and you can download pdf files on the different ways of referencing.

You can also download pdf files or information from other sources e.g. Chicago Author-Date referencing and APA style.

For information about other styles of referencing look at

         University of Birmingham for Harvard Author-Date style  

         University of Wisconsin for footnotes using Chicago style  

For online help with compiling and checking references a programme called EndNote can be used. This can be downloaded free on a trial basis from EndNote itself or from several other other download sites.

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