Skip to Main Content

Quality Control: Plagiarism & Referencing

Tips

Please confirm the referencing style with the academic staff member in charge of your research.

Some referencing methods have minor variations e.g. Harvard, Augmented Harvard and Harvard British Standard.

Be consistent when using a certain style.

Citation Style Guides

Plagiarism Detection Software

Turnitin is a tool to check for plagiarism. A researcher's work is instantly checked for potential plagiarism by comparing it against the world's largest comparison database using pattern recognition algorithms.

To arrange for access to the Turnitin software please contact your supervisor/study leader.

Reference Management Software Tools

Mendeley Referencing System

Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research

Mendeley is currently rolled out to all Business Mangement Students at Unisa.

Features of Mendeley:

Discover and download resources

Organize, store and retrieve your papers - anytime and anywhere

Read and annotate your papers and notes

Collaborate and share knowledge with others in your field

Create and update citations and bibliographies using any of the 7000+ styles

Promote yourself to an international audience by building your personal profile and connecting with others

Plagiarism & Citing of references

•When writing your research, you will be expected to cite and reference everything that is not your own work.
•Citations in the body of the work must be accurate so that they can be located easily by other researchers and your reference list should include all the works you have consulted.
•If you do not acknowledge these works, you could be accused of plagiarism, which is considered a serious offence.
•Software can be used to detect plagiarism e.g. Turnitin.
•The purpose of a reference or citation is to describe a published item accurately and with sufficient detail to enable a reader to identify it and find it again
•Main reference styles are Harvard and APA
•Be consistent
•You can manually reference your sources or use a reference managing system like Mendeley RefWorks
•You are allowed, and even encouraged to refer to other scholars contributions in your research, as these bring quality to your own work, as long as you acknowledge the source and remember to cite it.

Other Reference Management Software Tools