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INTRODUCTION
Your growth as a student and researcher
Once you become an Honorary, Masters or PhD Fellow, you will plan your own research project that will add to what we know about education in South Africa today. You will begin with your own reading program to support your work in educational theory, policy, curriculum and research theory. The more you work with other people's ideas, the more important it is to separate them from your own, which is done with the referencing conventions presented here.
Thinking about knowledge and independent academic voice
PLAGIARISM
How to avoid plagiarism
Referencing shows that you know about important thinkers in education and that you distinguish your ideas from theirs. When you copy, you don't necessarily engage with the ideas in order for them to become part of your knowledge structures. This is so that you can refer to it correctly if you decide to use the material later.
The more you understand the requirements of the task or the argument, the easier it will be to express it in your own words. Mind maps, graphs, tables, study journals and pictures help you restructure knowledge so that you can work with it more independently. This will help you work with ideas from your readings rather than simply reproducing them.
Checking for plagiarism using Turnitin
The thesis that I am now submitting for the degree of:. a) has been published/accepted for publication in.
REFERENCING
Introductory referencing basics
It is essential that you acknowledge the contribution that other writers have made to your writing. To summarize: your acknowledgment of the work of other writers should appear twice in your writing: first, in the body of your writing, as described in section 3.2, and second, at the end of your assignment or thesis in the REFERENCE LIST , as described in section 4. The system described in this booklet is the American Psychological Association (APA, 7th edition) system and is the one that the Rhodes University Faculty of Education would like its students to use.
The examples in this booklet describe the most common types of reference materials used in the Faculty of Education. A copy of the APA Publications Manual is available online for any citation concerns not covered in this booklet. Second, provide your reader(s) with a 'heading list' that will allow them to find the original versions of the texts you used, should they wish.
Some in-text referencing conventions
- Acknowledgement of sources
- Presentation of in-text quotes
- Incorporating in-text quotes into your text
If you want to acknowledge an author whose general ideas you drew on, or whose ideas support your argument, simply write Khumalo (2006) without page numbers. Note that the page number, in parentheses, comes after the period at the end of the citation. If you omit words from a quotation, use an ellipsis to show where these omitted words were in the original text.
An ellipse consists of three evenly spaced dots with a space on either side of the dots. The reason for using the past tense in relation to the author's arguments is that it is possible that the author may have changed his views on the subject in the time between the writing of the text and your writing. If you have authors with the same last name, use their first initials with the last name to separate them:.
If you have cited more than one text published by the same author in a single year, list them as follows and do the same in your reference list:. Always give the date of the secondary source, as in the example above: Christie (2010). If you have used an article from an edited book, the name of the author of the chapter you are quoting from, and not the editor, should appear in your text. i) Citing texts with two, three or more authors.
If you have a long paragraph where you cite the same author(s) multiple times, you can use (ibid.) instead of writing all the author(s) details again. When quoting a passage, if you give personal emphasis to a word or phrase by italicizing it, you must indicate this by writing: [emphasis added] after the passage you have quoted. If you need to quote something that has an obvious mistake (such as a spelling mistake) and you want to draw attention to the fact that the mistake is not yours, use the word [sic] (which means 'so' or 'therefore'), in square brackets and in italics , immediately after the corresponding element.
If you do not know the reference source for a particular article or extract, and after an exhaustive search you could not find the original text, you can indicate this in your writing as (source unknown).
Managing your reference list
However, this path should only be taken as a last resort as it is a poor reflection of your scholarship. All references used in your text should appear in a separate section at the end of your work entitled REFERENCES. Authors in the references should be listed in alphabetical order, with last name, initials, and publication date at the beginning of each entry.
If there is more than one entry for an author, the works are listed in the date order (earliest to latest) of their publication. Capitalization in titles occurs only at the beginning of a title, after a colon, or when the title contains words that are normally capitalized, such as proper names or corporate authors (e.g., National Planning Commission). When typing out references, make sure to turn off the right margin alignment setting (i.e. use only the left margin alignment).
If you don't make this simple technical adjustment, your reference spacing will be out of whack. However, this is still a matter of personal preference, so take your supervisor's advice here.
EXAMPLES OF DIFFERENT REFERENCE LIST ENTRIES
WHOLE BOOKS
Dei (eds.), African indigenous knowledge and the disciplines, anti-colonial educational perspectives for transformative change (Vol.
CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
JOURNALS
NEWSPAPERS
MAGAZINES
CONFERENCES
DISSERTATIONS AND THESES
GOVERNMENT SOURCES
ELECTRONIC SOURCES
AUDIOVISUAL
INTERVIEWS AND OTHER FORMS OF DISCUSSION
- APA FOR BEGINNERS
- SOME CHANGES FROM APA 6th TO APA 7th
- RESOURCES FOR APA REFERENCING
- APPENDICES
Surnames and initials of up to 20 authors (instead of seven) must be provided in the reference entry. ALL journal articles, even print versions, must have a doi or URL at the end of the reference using this format: https://doi.org/10.xxxxxxxxxxx (no period at the end). If you're using a print version and can't find a doi or URL, look for it online.
URLs are no longer prefixed with "Retrieved from" unless the website or online page is updated intermittently. Only the first word of the title and any proper nouns (and, if it's a two-part title, the first word after the colon) are capitalized. Ask your supervisor if he wants hyperlinks to the websites or just the text Authors.
Imagine you've found a text you want to refer to in an assignment, BUT. First, you have to ask whether we should use sources that give us so little information about who wrote them, when, and where. A text that appears to have no publisher or author, is unnumbered, or is otherwise incomplete may not have the authority or precision you want in your assignment or thesis.
If there is no author, use the title of the article instead of the author's name. NOTE: Since the title of the text is always italicized, it will also be italicized in the references. The language situation in South Africa was found to have "strong implications for issues of equity" (Achievement gaps expand, n.d., unpaged).
Since you have not directly quoted any words from the text, you do not need to provide page number information.
Plagiarism in the Education Faculty at Rhodes
Using others' ideas or words is not plagiarism if they are properly referenced, that is, if you acknowledge where they come from, using one of the academic referencing systems you have been shown. Education Faculty teachers recognize that the internet makes copying and pasting dangerously easy and that the lines between research and copying can become blurred. However, students should know that changes in style and vocabulary are very easy to detect.
When this happens, the staff member types that sentence or phrase into the internet that provides the source or runs the command through Turnitin. Once your assignment is linked to a text, there is already evidence that you have plagiarized, and the Rhodes policy emphasizes that "the student's intent, negligence, or innocence is irrelevant to the determination of whether plagiarism, as a matter of fact, has happened". This is fraud, like cheating on exams, and Rhodes's plagiarism policy has penalties for this kind of copying.
The higher you are (i.e. after the second year) and the more plagiarism cases are filed against you, the more seriously the university looks at your case. Employees have a professional duty to “be alert to instances of plagiarism and handle such instances in accordance with this policy.” At the Faculty of Education, we are concerned with the professionalism of students who use other people's work as if it were their own. Category A violations are first-time minor violations (e.g. short stretches of text or false references) by freshmen.
In that case, the student may be asked to redo the work and a point penalty may be imposed. Category B violations concern repeated violations of a minor nature, or relatively minor violations at a higher study level than the first year, or the first time, more serious violations, such as copying large pieces of text or copying an assignment from another student. Penalties in this case may be a reduction of points, zero points awarded, and/or the student may lose their DP certificate.
Category C violations concern gross, very serious violations by students that are assessed by the Departmental Plagiarism Committee by a Disciplinary Committee of the Permanent Plagiarism Committee in the Senate.
Declaration of Originality