References

To ensure clarity, the definitions of certain words are restricted as follows:

Quotation

A repeated or copied passage with an indication that it has been borrowed.

Citation

A mention of previous work as an example or to support an argument. In this definition all quotations are citations but the inverse is false.

Reference

A direction of attention to a book or article used as a source of information for a scholarly work.

Bibliography

A list of quoted, cited and uncited material used in the preparation of a book.

(List of) References

A list of all cited material used in the preparation of a scientific work.

Any part of your report that quotes or cites or presents any information obtained from a previously published (or to be published) document, must be properly referenced. Section 10 discusses how to do this without inadvertingly plagiarising. Citation serves two purposes. It gives credit to those who have done the work being used or quoted, and eliminates the need to reproduce volumes of data or information in the report. The list of sources for this supportive material would normally be called a Bibliography or List of References. Technical reports contain References. The term Bibliography is usually left to the humanities or substantial scientific works such as books, handbooks or textbooks.

Reference material adds validity to your research. All scientific advances are built on previous knowledge. Citations allow the use of that foundation and associated credibility. Citing is not a legal way of copying. Citation provides a concise way of incorporating the research of others so that comparison is possible. Extremely useful papers called reviews are comprehensive pertinent citations on one subject. Reviews contain no new material. However, they serve to consolidate the state of the art in one concise document.

There are many ways of referencing material in the text, each with a corresponding layout in the Reference section. The humanities treat this subject completely differently. Even within the natural sciences there are many standards. Engineering holy wars get started by discussing such subjects. One popular method of referencing material in engineering reports and publications is to cite the publication in the text using a number placed in brackets. The complete reference to the material then appears numbered in the Reference section.

The information contained in the complete reference depends on the type of material. Normally the information is presented in the following order: authors, title, volume, publisher, year, page number.The title of a book or journal should be capitalized and italicized. Only the first word of the title of a paper in a journal is capitalized (and not italicized). You will find examples and their formats for most types of references cited, including web pages, in the Bibliography section on page of this manual.

These are a few additional notes about references that are a question of taste but will be imposed on you for uniformity's sake:

• The references are listed sequentially in the order that they are first cited in the text.

• Three or fewer authors are listed together in the text. e.g., Jones [1], or Jones and Williams [2], or Jones, Williams and Baxter [3]. If there are four or more authors, then Jones et al. [4] would be written in the text.

• The full reference, including all the authors, the title of the report, paper, book, etc., who published it, where it was published, the volume and the issue number (usually applies to journals), the year of publication, and the page numbers (if applicable) is given in the Reference section.

• It is not required that the author be named textually in the main matter. For example, ``It was shown [4] that ...", is acceptable but sometimes leads to confusion. When inserting a new citation in the text, the reference numbers have to be resequenced. It is much easier to verify this numbering if the names of the authors appear in the text.