Correct Referencing: Rules, Types of Citation and Examples

In front of you sits a paragraph that makes your argument better than you could. Copy it word for word and you need quotation marks. Reword it, and most people assume the problem has gone away.

Citing correctly means making it clear, for every borrowed idea, where it came from, precisely enough that another reader can look up the passage. Word-for-word material sits inside quotation marks, reworded material sits in your own sentences, and both carry a reference with author, year and page. British universities treat the two as equally serious, and the rules that apply to you depend on whether you are a student or a researcher.

📌 The key points

• Plagiarism means using others' work without acknowledgement.
• Rewording without a reference still counts as plagiarism.
• Universities separate academic misconduct from research misconduct.
• Buying an essay is a criminal offence in England since 2022.
• Your department's referencing guide overrides every rule of thumb.

Why referencing is compulsory and what counts as plagiarism

Referencing is not a formality. It is the condition that keeps your work checkable: anyone reading a claim must be able to look up what it rests on. Where the reference is missing, the borrowed thought looks like your own, and that confusion is what turns the borrowing into plagiarism.

The definition used across the UK research sector is short. The UK Research Integrity Office Code of Practice for Research describes plagiarism as using other people's ideas, intellectual property or work, written or otherwise, without acknowledgement or permission. The same wording appears in the Concordat to Support Research Integrity, so the two documents do not pull in different directions.

Why rewording alone does not replace a reference

The wording covers ideas, not just sentences. That settles the most common misconception about referencing: putting a borrowed thought into your own words without acknowledging the source is the same act as copying it out. The text looks different, the idea underneath is still someone else's. Paraphrasing is treated on equal terms with quotation throughout this guide for exactly that reason.

Academic misconduct and research misconduct are handled separately

British universities run two distinct procedures, and it is worth knowing which one applies to you. Academic misconduct covers assessed student work and is dealt with by the department or a faculty panel. Research misconduct covers published research and goes to a formal investigation under the institution's research integrity policy.

Many institutions also recognise an intermediate category, usually called poor academic practice, for sloppy referencing without any intent to deceive. A first-year essay with muddled citations often lands there rather than in a misconduct hearing. That is not a reason to relax: the category exists to allow a proportionate response, not to excuse the error. What follows a suspected case is covered in our guide to plagiarism checking for your dissertation.

Direct quotation: copying word for word without changing anything

A direct quotation reproduces a passage from another source exactly, marked with quotation marks and followed by a reference including the page number. Spelling, punctuation and emphasis stay as they appear in the original, even where they are outdated or wrong.

That duty of accuracy is why direct quotation is used far more sparingly than most students expect. Copying a passage shows only that you found it, not that you understood it. Quotation earns its place with definitions, with unusually well-turned formulations, and wherever you go on to analyse the exact wording.

You may intervene inside a quotation, but every intervention must be visible. Four conventions cover almost everything that comes up in an undergraduate dissertation.

• Omission: three dots inside square brackets, written as [...]. Older guides also distinguish between one and several omitted words, which is no longer usual.
• Your own addition: place it in square brackets and label it, for example [my addition].
• Error in the original: put [sic] straight after it so readers can see the mistake is not yours.
• Your own emphasis: record it in the reference, usually with the note "emphasis added".

When a quotation becomes an indented block

Longer quotations are set as an indented block and lose their quotation marks in the process. Where the threshold sits is decided by the referencing style, and the figures differ. The American Psychological Association gives a hard number: under the APA guidelines on quotations, anything from 40 words upwards is set as a block quotation, indented and without quotation marks.

Harvard styles used in the UK tend to work with lines rather than words, and the usual rule of thumb is to indent from roughly three lines. No single authority sets that figure. Where your department's guide gives a different threshold, follow the guide; where it says nothing, pick one and apply it throughout.

💡 Tip

Note the page number at the moment you copy a passage, not later. Quotations without page numbers are the single most common reason for leafing back through entire books in the last days before submission.

Paraphrase: your own words, and still a reference

A paraphrase restates the content of another source in your own words and still carries a full reference. The quotation marks fall away, the acknowledgement does not. Paraphrase is the normal case in academic writing and direct quotation the exception, not the other way round.

A genuine paraphrase changes sentence structure and vocabulary, not just individual words. Swapping in synonyms while leaving the original syntax intact produces a badly disguised quotation rather than a paraphrase. Similarity software finds those passages reliably, and markers notice them through the break in writing style.

Do you need a page number in a paraphrase?

Styles disagree, and the disagreement causes real confusion. Harvard as used at most British universities expects a page number for a paraphrase, because it points to a specific passage. APA 7 recommends one but does not require it, suggesting it mainly for long works where the reader would otherwise struggle. Footnote systems expect it as a matter of course.

Correct as of September 2026, subject to change.

Reporting verbs do the work that quotation marks cannot

Because a paraphrase carries no quotation marks, the reader needs another signal that a position belongs to someone else. Reporting verbs supply it: "Ellis argues", "Ellis found", "Ellis suggests". The choice of verb also tells your reader how much weight the source carries, which is why "claims" and "demonstrates" are not interchangeable.

The practical benefit shows up over longer passages. If a paragraph opens with a reporting verb and closes with the reference, everything between the two is visibly attributed. Without that frame, a reference at the end of a paragraph leaves earlier sentences looking like your own analysis, which is the error described further down this page.

Secondary citation: when you cannot reach the original

A secondary citation reproduces a statement you have not read in the original but found quoted in another work. British referencing guides mark it with the phrase "cited in", giving both sources in a single reference. You name two works and have read only one of them.

A secondary citation is acceptable only where the original really is out of reach, for instance an out-of-print volume, an unpublished manuscript or a source in a language you do not read. Out of reach does not mean absent from your own library. Inter-library loan through the British Library costs you a few days and is the normal route.

The pattern looks like this in the two systems most common at British universities. The elements stay the same and only the order changes.

• Harvard, in the text: (Fielding 1998, cited in Ellis 2023, p. 45)
• APA 7, in the text: (Fielding, 1998, as cited in Ellis, 2023)

The reference list carries only the work you actually held, so Ellis in both cases. Listing both titles claims a reading that never happened, and a marker who checks the original will notice.

⚠️ Careful

A secondary citation inherits the errors of the intermediate source. Wrong dates, shortened claims and sentences lifted out of context pass unchecked into your work. Where secondary citations cluster in one chapter, it reads to a marker as a sign that the foundational literature has not been read.

Which sources you are allowed to cite

Before the question of how to reference comes the question of what may be referenced at all. Two separate criteria decide it, and they are regularly confused: whether a source is traceable, and whether it is academically credible. A source has to satisfy both.

A source is traceable if it has been published and remains findable by a third party. That is purely a question of access. It is credible if its content meets academic standards, so it was produced transparently, reviewed by peers or an editor, and can be attributed to a responsible person or institution. That is a question of quality.

Sources that satisfy both criteria

• Journal articles from peer-reviewed publications, findable by DOI.
• Monographs and edited collections from academic publishers.
• Official statistics, for example from the Office for National Statistics.
• Doctoral theses published through a university's institutional repository.

Sources that fail, and where exactly they fail

• Lecture slides are rarely publicly accessible and therefore usually not traceable.
• Wikipedia entries are traceable but name no responsible author, so they are not credible.
• Answers from language models cannot be reproduced and fail the traceability test outright.
• Tabloid coverage is traceable but not credible as evidence for factual claims.

The tabloid case shows why credibility cannot be settled in the abstract. Writing about pension policy, you would not take figures from that source. Writing about the media framing of pension policy, those articles are exactly what you cite, as material rather than as evidence. What decides is the role the source plays in your argument.

Online sources add a question of stability, because pages disappear and addresses change. Which details make a web source complete, and how to protect it against link rot, is covered in our guide to citing internet sources. For printed works, the same logic appears in our guide to citing books.

Choosing a referencing style: four systems compared

A referencing style decides where the reference sits and in what order its parts appear. Every style asks for the same substance, namely author, year, title and location. They differ in form rather than content, which is why the choice matters less than it feels like it does.

The four systems in common use at British universities fall into two groups. Author-date systems put a short reference in brackets in the running text. Note systems put it at the foot of the page and keep brackets out of the text. Mixing the two in one piece of work is the most frequent formal error of all.

There is no nationally mandated referencing style in the United Kingdom. Your department's guide comes first, even where it departs from what is usual in the discipline; where no guide exists, follow the style of the literature you are already reading. Several institutions name Cite Them Right Harvard as their house standard, which is why the name turns up so often in library guidance.

One recent change is worth knowing, because it makes older examples look wrong. Cite Them Right dropped the place of publication from book references in its 2025 edition, so a reference built from a 2019 handout will now include a detail your guide no longer asks for. The two systems used most widely are covered in our guides to the Harvard referencing style and to footnote referencing.

Buying an essay is a criminal offence in England

Since 28 June 2022, providing or arranging an essay-writing service for a student in England has been a criminal offence. The provision sits in section 27 of the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022 and covers completing all or part of an assignment on a student's behalf in commercial circumstances. Section 28 makes advertising such a service an offence in its own right.

Two limits on that provision matter for students and are widely misreported. The offence applies to England only, not across the whole United Kingdom, and it targets the provider, not the student who buys. Purchasing an essay does not make you criminally liable under this Act.

None of that makes buying one safe. Submitting work you did not write is contract cheating, and it is dealt with under your institution's academic misconduct procedures, where the usual outcome for a proven case is severe. The Act removed the legal cover from a commercial industry; it did not change anything about what happens to the student.

The reason this belongs in a guide on referencing is that the boundary is thinner than it looks. Paid proofreading that rewrites arguments, a shared answer in a study group, an AI tool that drafts a section: each of these shifts authorship away from you, and each is judged by the same question your referencing answers, namely which part of this work is yours.

Common referencing mistakes

Most penalties arise not from ignorance of referencing rules but from the last days before submission, when references are added afterwards instead of recorded as you read. Four mistakes recur often enough to be worth a dedicated pass through the finished draft.

Each of the four takes minutes to check if you look for it deliberately. One sweep of the whole document is more efficient than working chapter by chapter. Where referencing sits in the wider process is covered in our guide to academic working practice.

One reference at the end of a paragraph is meant to cover everything

A reference covers the sentence it sits in, not everything that came before it retrospectively. Summarising five sentences from a source and placing a single citation after the fifth leaves four sentences unattributed. The clean solution is a reporting verb at the start of the passage, such as "Ellis distinguishes three approaches", with the reference at the end.

Two referencing styles in one piece of work

Running a note system alongside an author-date system is the most common formal error in dissertations. It usually arises from reusing your own earlier essays written in different terms. Settle on one system early and check the chapter you wrote first, since that is where the older habit survives.

A quotation was quietly tidied up

A quotation in which an ending has been adjusted, a word inserted or old spelling modernised is no longer a quotation. Every alteration belongs in square brackets. Where the brackets make the sentence unreadable, that is a signal that a paraphrase would serve better at this point.

A source appears in the text but not in the reference list

Every source referenced in the text also appears in the reference list, and nothing appears there that the text never mentions. Both are obvious to a marker skimming the back matter. The quickest way to find such gaps is to work through the list from the bottom up, searching for each entry in the text.

Conclusion

Referencing well is less a matter of rule knowledge than of discipline while reading. Establish which style your department requires, record author, year and page at the moment you read rather than afterwards, and hold paraphrase to the same standard as quotation. Most problems are then solved before they arise.

Record it while you read and you will never have to search while you write. Almost every referencing error is made afterwards.

Where to go next

• Working with author-date references? Harvard referencing: rules and examples
• Working with footnotes? Footnote referencing explained
• Want the whole research process? Empirical research: definition and guide

Collecting your own data instead of citing someone else's?

Results from your own survey are not cited at all, they are your data and belong in the methodology chapter. With empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you can build one free of charge. How to structure the questions is set out in our guide to creating a questionnaire.