Source Material
The basic rule is that all material should be acknowledged and fully referenced. This serves three purposes:- it ensures that the reader can check the facts
- it acknowledges the contribution of others
- it helps others wishing to undertake similar projects or to pursue associated lines of enquiry
You MUST also reference any paraphrased or summarised text from elsewhere.
It is NOT ACCEPTABLE to merely list source material in a bibliography as
extra reading - this makes it impossible to relate it to specific sections.
It is NOT ACCEPTABLE to submit directly copied text without quotes, even
if an attempt has been made to cite these sections - it should be clear how
much material is directly copied or paraphrased.
It is NOT ACCEPTABLE to say that you have forgotten where you found
material (try Google!)
or that you meant to insert the citation at a later date and ran out
of time.
Examples
- Mawson (2001) calls this region "the mushy region" and so this phrase will be adopted in this work....
"Beginning with 50g of Sodium and 2 litres of water... followed by a large explosion" (Jimack and Hubbard, 1999).
- Fores (2001) proposes guidelines on how to attribute source material within a final year project report.
- There have been many attempts to solve the bus driver scheduling problem [1,2,8,20]. The most successful of these [8,20] use a column generation approach.
Students should ensure that they know how to quote and cite material which has been copied or summarised from other sources. This also applies to code and information which has been obtained from any other source. Students will confirm on submission of the report that its contents are their own work.
Unacknowledged verbatim quotes will be regarded as plagiarism and will be penalised by the examiners.
[With acknowledgements to Peter Jimack (2001) for contributions to this and
the layout of references section.
Jimack, Peter (2001), Discussion of FYP write-up presented Feb 2001.]