Referencing. It's one of those things we all love to hate; how many of us have sat there at the eleventh hour before handing an essay in panicking about whether citations have been entered properly, confused on how to cite webpages, or not knowing whether it should be Author, Initial, Year or Publisher, Location, Year?
It's clear that the University is failing epicly on two counts: firstly to provide any formal help or guidance on how to reference effectively and why we do it, and secondly by having different departments supporting different (or multiple) styles of referencing. How many of us, as undergraduates, are sat down in a lecture in our first year and taught the 'best practice' in how and why we reference.
It's a simple point: if the University are expecting a majority of our students to be capable of publishing in academic circles by the time of graduation, then there should be support embedded within degree programmes to ensure that we know what we're doing. It's not rocket-science!
Do you know how to reference effectively? Is it something you're even aware of? If not, you will be by the time you get around to doing a big piece of work like a dissertation ;-) Let's take a stand together, now, and fix the system today.
All of week 8 will be focused on a series of referencing workshops. RUSU will be running sessions focusing on why we reference and what can be done to improve referencing across the University; these are your chance to come along and voice your opinions on what you'd like done with referencing. I'm pushing for each Faculty to adopt a preferred style... but what do you want to happen? Come along and let me know, and at the same time you can brush up on the purposes of referencing and how to do it properly.
The Library are running two sessions in the same week that complement the campaign that we're running here in RUSU - for more information, stop by the Library website to see what's going on in their referencing workshops.
