Project Management
Using and citing your information
Evaluating Resources
Any reading material recommended for your course has obviously been evaluated by the lecturers. But when you have to find your own information, you need to judge its quality yourself. Before you use any information, you should evaluate it with regard to relevance, currency and reliability.Relevance
Ask yourself whether the article in question covers important aspects of the topic and whether it is sufficiently in-depth. Make sure that the type of information you have found is appropriate for your topic: historic information? statistical information? an overview? a critical review? books? newspaper or journal articles? If you have been asked to use only scholarly or peer-reviewed articles, you may need to use the Web of Science database; other databases, such as Business Source Premier, have a feature to limit searching to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles; these are also known as refereed articles.Currency
This relates to the date of publication. In rapidly evolving areas of research you will need very current information. Examine the date of publication of the book or journal. With web pages, check the date when it was last updated. If any references are listed, look at their dates as well.Reliability and Accuracy
You may feel you are not qualified to judge this, but if your article was published in a scholarly journal, it has already been examined by the editors. Refereed or peer reviewed journals only publish articles that have been evaluated by experts in the relevant field.If you are using other sources, for instance information published on the Internet, you should check that details of the author or organisation responsible are included; avoid sources that do not disclose those details. You can also look for the authors' qualifications and where they are employed. The domain in the URL indicates if it is a college or university (.edu), a government body (.gov), or a political or commercial organisation (.org or .com); this allows you to make some inferences as to how objective or reliable the information may be.
Do not trust information that is stated without indicating its sources, and if the sources are stated, try to work out if they are reliable. The type of language used will help you to judge whether the information is mostly factual, opinion or propaganda.
Citing or Referencing
Plagiarism
Essays, theses and assignments need to formally recognise the sources from which you have obtained information. Presenting another person's work as your own by copying it without due acknowledgement is plagiarism. You can find out more by reading Student plagiarism: course work. See also the Project Management Graduate Programme Student Handbook, under Academic Honesty. The Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association (SUPRA) has a handy pamphlet with more information about intellectual property & postgrads.
Referencing or citing is a formal way of acknowledging sources of information and ideas you have used in your assignment. It identifies the sources so they may be verified. You need to reference ideas and theories, facts, figures as well as direct quotations, from both published and unpublished sources. For more details see the Referencing Guide in the Project Management Graduate Programme Student Handbook.
Reference Styles
The Project Management Graduate Programme uses the Harvard Style. Referencing styles follow rules of punctuation and other details for setting out a bibliography, and for citing within the text of an assignment. The two guides below explain by examples, covering a variety of print and electronic sources.- Curtin University of Technology Library's guide to Harvard Referencing
- Univeristy of Queensland Library's Harvard Style guide
What you should do
- Keep accurate and complete details of all the sources you use. For journal articles you need article title, author/s, journal name, date, volume, issue and page numbers. For books you also need the publisher's name.
- Get into the habit from the beginning. It will become easier and save you time. Storing the information electronically is more convenient than hardcopy.
- Find out about EndNote referencing management software.
- Find out if your lecturer requires a more specific form of referencing, eg. legal referencing.
More Help
Go the the WriteSite for online support to help you develop your academic and professional writing skills (UniKey login required). - See also the University of Sydney Learning Centre .
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