Tuesday, 29 August 2017

Referencing Style for Quotes and In-Text Citations


Referencing Style for Quotes and In-Text Citations


Direct quotations are an important part of essay writing, especially for complex concepts or for capturing the full meaning and nuances which the original author intended. Make sure that you use direct quotes sparingly unless you are writing a literature or poetry analysis, in which case it’s important to show the original text so that the context can be fully understood.

Direct quotes should always be placed in quotation marks, and the in-text reference should be placed after the quotes but before the full stop of the sentence. A direct quote will thus look as follows:

“Gene therapy has been shown to be effective in treating certain types of developmental challenges” (Perry, 2014: 35).

The reference used in-text, or next to the direct quotes or paraphrases, looks different to the reference you add in the bibliography or reference list of your work. It will be shorter, and only contain limited information. Most in-text references include the surname of the author, the year that the work was published, and, in the case of direct quotes, the page number from which the quote is taken. The style will differ slightly depending on the referencing method you are using, but these components are almost always present.

For in-text references, if some of the information is included in another part of your sentence, you won’t have to repeat it between brackets after the information. For example, if you give the name of the author within the paraphrase, you won’t have to include the surname again in the reference. See the example below for how certain information is included within the body of your work:

Jonathan Perry explains that developmental challenges might be treated through gene therapy (2014: 35).

In his book Understanding Gene Therapy, published in 2014, Jonathan Perry explains that “[g]ene therapy has been shown to be effective in treating certain types of developmental challenges” (35).

Because the surname and year are included in the sentence, it’s not necessary to repeat them.

Let’s look briefly at some of the most widely-used referencing styles and how in-text citations look for each of them.