Why do I need to use a referencing system?

It is important to acknowledge other people’s ideas when writing an academic assignment otherwise you can be accused of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is leading people to believe that something is your own original work or idea when it is not. This can be deliberate (copying from someone or cutting and pasting from a website, for example) or it can be the result of poor referencing.

You must make it clear exactly:

• Which parts of your essay are based on other people’s work.
• Whose work you have used.
• How much of what you have written is not your own work.
• If you use the words of the original author, you must put them in quotation marks to show that you are ‘borrowing’ them.
• If you paraphrase (put the original into your own words), you must change the wording and the structure of the sentence.
• If your version is too close to the original, this can still be plagiarism, even if you have cited the source you used.

What is plagiarism?