Writing a dissertation for your academic degree is a challenging task. Nevertheless, one has to rise to the occasion and take care of all the factors that contribute to the good academic writing. Although we gain sufficient knowledge from interacting with our advisers, peers, textbooks, journals we must acknowledge the source of your information. We all build upon the acquired knowledge initially and then add our own perspective to it. It is academically unethical to pass someone else’s work as your own as that violates copyright issues. Such an academic work can never be deemed as an original. Hence referencing in such instances is important. Writers must include full details of the sources in their work. This gives an opportunity for the research community and the general public to understand what is exclusively your contribution and helps them discern what has been contributed by other researchers in your field. Also, many people would like to follow up in detail on the previous work submitted by other authors in your field.
Whenever you research your material for literature review and more, make sure to have annotation next to your bibliography or reference list. During referencing, dissertation writer must include the name of the authors, the title of the research, the title of the journal and volume number, the date of publication, etc.
When to use references
Every time you write your dissertation you must acknowledge the sources of the data or information unless the data is original and you have obtained it through experiments or case studies etc. In this way, you can claim your own data and the same time respects the original work of other authors. It is expected that the introduction, observation, analysis, and conclusion will be largely your own work expressed in your own voice. However, in the literature review and throughout the dissertation you are expected to quote or cite references of work done by other authors in your field of work.
Citing your source within the text
A citation is very important especially if you are going to quote words of some other author from another journal. Inline text citation usually requires you to write the surname of the authors and the date of the publication. Both the information must be included in brackets. Some style of dissertation writing also requires you to write footnotes, whereby the footnotes include the relevant reference in writing. The main purpose of footnotes is to acknowledge the author, the journal and the publication date without unfairly interrupting the flow in writing.
