Legal Research

Why do we reference? There are three main reasons why referencing is important. They are giving credit, showing your work, and what we call findability. Let's explore these ideas in a bit more detail. Reason one: giving credit. Referencing gives credit to the creators of the material that you've been using and helps you to avoid accusations of plagiarism. Plagiarism is when you take other people's ideas words sounds or images and pass them off as your own. Plagiarism is treated very seriously at university and correct referencing protects you from committing it even accidentally. Reason two: showing your work and building arguments. Referencing is evidence of your wide reading in the subject and it displays your learning. It also helps you to discuss issues and think critically using and expanding on other people's ideas is a vital part of academic writing whether you are agreeing or disagreeing or just discussing the arguments. Reason three: findability. Finally, referencing helps the people reading your work to find the sources you were using when you wrote it so they can learn more about the subject and verify you were using those sources accurately.

Hello and welcome to UTS Library's tutorial on referencing in the Australian Guide to Legal Citation or AGLC style this is a referencing style used within the UTS Faculty of Law. This video will introduce you to 10 basic principles for referencing in AGLC.

1:AGLC is a footnoting style that means that your in-text references which tells the reader about your sources appear as footnotes at the bottom of each page these references also appear in a bibliography at the end of the document. There are different ways to cite different kinds of sources like cases, legislation and journal articles. Our other videos will cover exactly how to reference each source type.

Every footnote ends in a full stop, a pinpoint reference is used if you need to refer to a specific section of a source for example using page numbers to show exactly where you have found a quote. In AGLC, a pinpoint can be a section, a page or a paragraph, depending on the source. If you are referring to the same source in consecutive footnotes you should use the term ebit to indicate the repeated source instead of repeating the entire reference. You can use ibid with different pinpoint references to show you are referring to different parts of the same source, like this.

If you are referring to a source you mentioned in an earlier footnote but not the immediately previous one you should use n pass the earlier footnote number in brackets. You should do this for all repeated references that are not in consecutive footnotes including cases and legislation. In your assignment you can put short quotations in single quotation marks but any quote longer than three lines should be indented from the left margin in a smaller font and without quotation marks.

Every source you rely on even if you don't cite it in the footnote should appear in your bibliography. This is divided into five sections: articles, books and reports, cases, legislation, treaties and other. You can leave out any section if you don't have any of that kind of reference in a bibliography. The first author's name appears differently to how it looks in the footnote. The first name and surname are inverted so they appear our surname comma first name. For works by two or more authors only the first names and surname are inverted, the rest of the names appear as they do in footnote. Finally, note that while references in footnotes always end in a full stop, the references in your bibliography never do.

Those were 10 basic principles for referencing in AGLC. This video is first in a series of videos covering referencing in AGLC. If you need further help you can visit our referencing pages or contact us on the library homepage.