General Referencing Guide: Why is Referencing important?

If you fail to properly reference the sources of information that you have included in your work, then you may be accused of plagiarism (see below).

However, proper referencing will not only help you to avoid plagiarism. It will  also:

• provide evidence of the breadth of your research.
• give credibility to your work by allowing your readers to access and check your original information sources.

Another way of looking at this, is that if you do not know how to properly reference sources of information, then it will not be possible for you to make use of all of the rich sources of information that is available to help you to produce your assignments.

Good referencing is not difficult. It simply requires an understanding of the basic principles and a careful and methodical application of those principles.