How to use in-text referencing

In-text citations

When you write down anything in your essay or lab report, you need to show where that idea, information, concept came from. 

As you know, you should use your own words to write the information and keep direct quotes to a minimum. If you include a direct quote, it is especially important to show where it came from, as it will be very obvious that they are not your words in the speech marks. 

All information that is not common knowledge should have an ‘in-text citation’ at the end of the sentence, or next to the name of the person(s) who said/discovered/invented it. This citation helps the reader find the right source in your Reference list, and then they can find the original source of information themselves. 

How you present the in-text citations can be different depending on where you are studying or writing. The main two in-text citation styles are ‘Author-Date’ and ‘Vancouver’.

“Author-Date” in-text references

This way of showing where you found your information is good as it lets the reader become familiar with the names of authors and researchers as they read your text and shows immediately when the information was published. This might be important if you only reference information that was published 50 years ago and your project is about things that happened in 2020! However, this style can take a bit of getting used to both reading and writing as it is seen to ‘break up’ the text. You might find it hard to read pages with lots of Author-Date in-text citations, and students often don’t like breaking up their writing with lots of punctuation, names, and years; that’s because a short paragraph might look like this:

Multiple publications have studied the use of multimodal learning materials in higher education (Archer 2016; Bezemer and Kress 2008; Bowen 2013; Huang 2017a; Lui 2018) and other authors have examined how multiple modes may convey argument (Archer 2016; Knapton 2013) or the meaning created by the arrangement of multimodal texts (Hiippala 2015). 

As you become practiced in reading texts like this, you will become fluent in not letting the in-text citations get in the way of you extracting the information; and as you become a practiced academic writer, you will not feel so ‘awkward’ about giving credit to the writers who gave you the information or ideas.

Different Reference styles may state that what goes inside of the parentheses (or the brackets as some people call them), so make sure you know before you start writing so you don’t have to waste time after you finish putting in, or taking out, commas. For example:

The last two examples include page numbers (page 38), which can really add time onto your writing task if you have forgotten to write down which page it was you took the information from! If there was no page number (if it was online for example) and your Reference style says you have to include one, you would write (Archer, 2016: np). If you have two studies by the same person in the same year, you have to designate a, b, etc. As above and below for (Huang 2017a, 2017b). 

With the Author-Date style, if you want to use the researcher or author’s name in the sentence, then the year their work was published always comes immediately after their name, for example:

Domingo (2012) believes that insights may be lost if interactive formats are forced to be “fossilised” into text formats. These studies discuss how writing is being replaced as the foremost means of explaining concepts, leading to Huang et al. (2017b) asserting that restricting research in the field of academic literacies to writing alone is no longer viable.

In the examples above, you can see how to cite: a single author, multiple authors, multiple studies, multiple studies by the same author in the same year. If many sources of information show the same thing, you can cite them all, and this is normally in alphabetical order, or chronological order (from oldest to most recent). If you are citing two or more authors with the same surname (family name), you will have to distinguish between them by using their first initial (Bert C, 1998; Bert W, 2018), or even their second initials if the first ones are the same (Cardín F.C, 2019; Cardín F.R, 2021). See below to understand how to cite studies by people with the same surname in the same year.

The key to in-text citations, and all of academic writing, is to be consistent. Whatever style you use at the start of your paper to present the in-text citations, keep that style going throughout your text. Even if it is slightly wrong, being consistent should help you keep your top marks for your writing!

“Vancouver” style in-text references

The Vancouver type of referencing is a numerical system that breaks up the text less than the Author-Date system but the downside is that it doesn’t show the reader who wrote the original source without them looking through the References list. This is easier (like many things!) with digital documents and their ability to include hyperlinks — you can click on the citation number and you move automatically (more or less) to the relevant reference, where there is often a link to click to take you to that website or paper on a journal’s website. So it is a lot faster nowadays, but you still lose your place on the original document so remember what you were reading before you click on any Vancouver hyperlinks!

The Vancouver-style numbers should appear in the order they appear, and they might be in parentheses (1) or square brackets [2] in line with the text, or superscript attached to the last word of the relevant sentence before the punctuation3, or after the punctuation.4 These superscript numbers might be followed by a parenthesis5), in brackets[6], or express a range of multiple citations7-10. As you might know (or remember from the ABEL  guide to punctuation in academic writing), numerical rangers are normally expressed with an “em dash” — but this is sometimes overlooked by some journals so you might see (11—13) or (14-17, 18, 20) when the writer (or you!) is citing multiple sources.

With Vancouver style, if you want to use the researcher or author’s name in the sentence, then the reference always comes immediately after their name, for example (using the same paragraph as above so you can compare the two styles):

Domingo24 believes that insights may be lost if interactive formats are forced to be “fossilised” into text formats. These studies discuss how writing is being replaced as the foremost means of explaining concepts, leading to Huang et al.25 asserting that restricting research in the field of academic literacies to writing alone is no longer viable.

Remember that the in-text citation always comes after the author’s name:

Incorrect:

“Domingo et al. reported that they achieved a success rate of 89% using the new procedure [7].”

The reader doesn't want to get to the end of a long section and before they see the right citation!

Correct:

“Domingo et al. [7] reported that they achieved a success rate of 89% using the new procedure.”

A downside with the Vancouver system is that if you are not using referencing software and you are editing your document, moving sections about, you have to reorder your references, both in-text and in your Reference list, and this can get confusing! 

If you have a specific question or you really struggle with when to Referencve and how to do it, get specialised, personalised help by clicking below: