In-Text Citations

Referencing is made up of two elements: In-Text Citations and Full References.

In-text citations appear in the body of your text, alongside the information you have quoted, paraphrased or summarised. A citation should include the author's surname, the year of publication, and a page number if required (page numbers or paragraph numbers are always required when using direct quotes). For every in-text citation there should be a corresponding full reference in your reference list where readers can find full details of the information source.

Examples of in-text citations

	Source with one author	Source with two authors	Source with three authors	Source with four or more authors
Parenthetical Citation	Referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice (Hall, 2019).	Referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice (Hall and Smith, 2019).	Referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice (Hall, Smith and Sadiq, 2018).	Referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice (Hall et al., 2019)
Narrative Citation	Hall (2019) asserts that referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice.	Hall and Smith (2019) assert that referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice.	Hall, Smith and Sadiq (2019) assert that referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice.	Hall et al. (2019) asserts that referencing is the cornerstone of good academic practice.

Corporate authors

Some sources are written or produced by corporate bodies and organisations, who may also be the publisher. In this situation, give the name of the organisation as the author.

For organisations with particularly long names, you should use the full name in the first instance with their abbreviated initials in the citation.

e.g. according to the United Nations Framework Conference of Climate Change (UNFCCC, 2017)...

For organisations who are better known by their initials (e.g. NHS, BBC, etc) you may use their initials in all instances.

Page numbers

Use the p. abbreviation when giving a page number, use pp. for a page range.
If you are quoting directly from a page or using ideas from a specific page, you should always give the page number(s).
If you are summarising a work more broadly, you do not need to give page numbers.
Where page numbers are not present, you may have to indicate location by other means: paragraph number, percentage, section number, etc.

Citing a source with no date or no author

You may come across some sources without a publication date. Most often this is websites.

You should always do your best to attempt to find a publication date, but when none is present, use the phrase (no date) or (n.d) in your citation and reference.

e.g. (Williams and Kane, no date)

When there is no author listed, you may use the title of the work instead of the author.

e.g. (Trends in Information Management, no date)

For websites, without an author or date, you may also use the URL in the citation, but carefully consider the quality of a website as an academic source if it does not have information on who wrote it.

Citing multiple works by the same author in the same year

Some proflific authors might produce multiple works within the same year, and you might use several of these in your work. To avoid confusion about which particular work you are citing at a given time, add a letter after the publication date in both your citation and reference.

e.g.

Citations:

Hall (2023a) argued that milk chocolate is delicious. However he later decided that dark chocolate is better (Hall, 2023b).

References:

Hall, T. (2023a) The properties of milk chocolate. London: Routledge.

Hall, T. (2023b) Why I love dark chocolate best. London: Routledge.