Find out how to format and reference your academic work.
You can download useful examples for structuring and presenting your academic work on this page.
We also explain referencing requirements. It's crucial that you know how to avoid plagarism, as 'copying' another person's work could lead to your failing the assignment or even the unit.
For more academic resources, log in to Learning Hub online.
When completing assignments at university, you must acknowledge any ideas or concepts you use in your writing that were created by someone else.
Not doing so is a breach of academic integrity, and is treated as serious academic misconduct.
VU's Academic Integrity Policy explains the importance of staff and student honesty in relation to academic work. It outlines the kinds of behaviours that are considered to be 'academic misconduct', including plagiarism.
Consistently and accurately acknowledging the source of the ideas you use improves the quality of your assignments, and ensures you maintain the standard of academic integrity required at university.
Examples of plagiarism include:
Most people would interpret the first two examples given above as cheating. You are required to do your own assignments and research, so using someone else’s work and pretending it is your own would not be acceptable.
The last two examples are breaches of academic integrity that are perhaps less clear cut, but no less important, and you need to be aware of what you refer to and understand how to avoid doing this.
An important part of academic writing within Australian and other academic contexts is acknowledgement of the work of other people. The ideas and concepts that you use in your academic assignments while at university need to be acknowledged. In other words, you need to indicate to your readers which ideas belong to other authors by indicating the 'sources' of these ideas.
The term 'sources', as used here, refers to where these ideas and information come from. They are often readings from textbooks and journals, particularly ones that are part of your weekly readings. They may also be readings from other materials that you find. This could include materials from hard-copy books, or, very frequently, materials you have found in digital format online from a range of websites, both academic and less-academic ones.
Wherever your ideas come from and whatever the sources, it is important that you acknowledge these clearly and accurately each time. If you do not do this adequately, your writing may be considered to be a form of plagiarism and in some cases this could lead to your failing the assignment or even the unit. To avoid this, you must use referencing.
There are various kinds of referencing conventions or referencing styles.
Author-date (or ‘in-text’) styles, like APA or Harvard, include referencing information about quotes and paraphrases in brackets as part of your writing (VU, 2015). While numeric styles, such as Oxford or IEEE, use superscript1 or square bracketed numerals [1] that refer the reader to referencing information at either the bottom of each page (as in our example) or at the end of the work.
You can find out which style is required for your subject area by consulting your unit guide or asking your tutor. Once you know which referencing style you are expected to use, you can visit the VU Library to find the appropriate style guide.
Each style guide provides examples of the correct referencing formats for everything from books to journal articles to podcasts, lecture notes and visual material.
For more information on VU's study advice and guidance, please email the Learning Hub team: [email protected].
