Premise and Definitions

Table of Contents

  1. Premise
  2. Definitions
    1. Source materials
    2. Bibliography
    3. Full reference
    4. In-text reference
    5. Locator
    6. Plagiarism
  3. References

Premise

In this crash course, we will be assuming that you are a student preparing an assignment for a course that involves a degree of academic writing, like a critical essay or thesis. Such assignments usually come with specific instructions that need to be taken into account. Always check the instructions, and know that they always take precedence over anything that is mentioned in these pages.

The crash course was specifically catered to students who are required to complete English-language writing assignments at the University of Borås’ Swedish School for Library and Information Science. While we are hopeful that much of the advice we put forward can be extrapolated to other contexts, you should be aware that rules and best practices can differ between languages, cultures, disciplines, etc. When in doubt, always check with your local authority (e.g., course leader, thesis supervisor, journal editor).

These materials were originally prepared with Master’s students in mind. This means that the students we write this crash course for should already have acquired some academic writing qualifications by successfully completing a relevant Bachelor’s programme. We therefore assume that our target audience will already be familiar with much of what is written here. Experience has taught us, however, that a quick refresher of some of the main principles can always be useful. We are also aware of the fact that many of our students are participating in an international programme, and that their diverse learning backgrounds may have put different emphases in their academic writing instruction. We therefore hope that these pages will help level the playing field.

Finally, we want to emphasise that we are specifically focussing on issues that frequently come up in our evaluations of assignments, signalling that our students continue to struggle with them. As a result, we ask you not to consider our advice as an exhaustive guide to academic writing.

Definitions

Throughout our crash course, a couple of important concepts keep coming up. Below, we try to offer some concise definitions so it becomes clear what we mean when we use them, and offer some things to keep in mind.

Source materials

When you are writing an academic text, your sources are any materials you use to build your own scholarly argument. Some of these may be academic sources, published in academically vetted publication venues. Some sources may be non-academic, like websites, policy documents, etc. Some may inhabit a space in between, having been written by academics, following academic standards, but without formally having passed through an established review process yet.

While your focus should be on academic sources, non-academic sources can be used with moderation, as long as they are clearly placed in the right context in your writing. For examples of academic and non-academic sources materials, which of these to use, which to avoid, and how to put them in the right context, see our page on which sources to use.

Bibliography

Your bibliography is a list of all the source materials you have incorporated into your own writing. Sometimes the heading of this list is called ‘Bibliography’, sometimes ‘References’, sometimes ‘Works Cited’, etc. Some disciplines distinguish between ‘bibliographies’ and ‘works cited lists’, in which case a ‘bibliography’ can be more more extensive than a ‘works cited list’, and also include relevant (reference) works that may not have been mentioned in the text itself. We do not make such a distinction, and will usually advise our students to label their list of references as a ‘Bibliography’.

As such, we expect your bibliography to contain all the works that have been referenced in your text, and only the works that have been referenced in your text. In other words: every in-text reference in your text (be that a narrative or parenthetical reference) needs to be expanded into a full reference in your bibliography; and every reference in your bibliography needs to be used and referenced at some point in your text.

As an academic writer, it is your duty to credit your sources. Failing to do so will be regarded as plagiarism (see below). In the same vein, it is also your duty to make sure that all the texts that have considerably contributed to your thinking and argumentation are mentioned in your text in some way or other (e.g., a citation, paraphrase, mention for further reading, etc.) – and, as a result, referenced in your text and in your bibliography.

Full reference

The full reference to a source is the reference as it is included in your bibliography, that includes all the necessary and relevant information required for the reader to locate the source, and indicate (at a glance) who authored it, when, in what kind of publication venue. The formatting of these references need to strictly adhere to a predetermined referencing system. In our case, this referencing system will almost always be APA 7, which is widely used in the field of Library and Information Science, and other Social Sciences. Sometimes, an assignment will allow you to pick another relevant referencing system, when this can be clearly motivated. Academic journals will also usually specify exactly which referencing system they expect submitting authors to follow. Always be sure to check and follow author guidelines before submitting a paper to a journal.

In-text reference

The in-text reference is a shorthand version of the full reference, that allows you to point to any full reference in your bibliography. It lists the relevant information to navigate the bibliography. Usually this is the source’s author and year of publication, but this varies across referencing systems. The in-text reference also always specifies exactly where the quoted or paraphrased information can be found in the source (e.g., in the form of a page number), where possible and relevant. For more information on when to include which locating information in your in-text references, check out our page on page numbers etc.

In-text references are usually parenthetical references.1 This means that the information appears inside a (parenthesis) that is placed at the end of a sentence (or sub-sentence). But it is also possible to weave most of the relevant information into your narrative. If you do, and it is unambiguously clear which source from your bibliography you are referencing, that relevant information no longer needs to be included inside a parenthetical reference. This type of reference (where the relevant information is incorporated into your text) is called a ‘narrative in-text reference’ (in contrast to a ‘parenthetical in-text reference’). An example could be the following:

✨ Best Practice

In a recent article titled “Ventures Towards an Authorial Avant-texte: From Print to Digital Environment”, Franz Johansson uses the works of Francis Ponge and Jean-Philippe Toussaint to discuss a rare literary phenomenon where authors publish a curated set of their draft documents, to offer the reader a look behind the scenes of their creative writing processes. Johansson calls this phenomenon the “authorial avant-texte”, to make it clear that in this case it is the author (rather than the genetic critic or editor) who puts together a version of their work’s genetic dossier (¶3).

In this example, the first sentence is a paraphrase. And since it summarises the article’s overarching narrative, the reference applies to the whole article and does not require a page or paragraph number. If we were using a parenthetical in-text reference, we would place (Johansson 2025) at the end of the first sentence. However, since both the author and the title of the article were already explicitly mentioned in our ‘narrative’ sentence itself, we can use this information to look up the reference in the bibliography (even if more works by the same author had been referenced in the same text). This makes the parenthetical in-text reference largely redundant, allowing us to leave it out.

The second sentence, on the other hand, includes a quote, which always requires a locator (here: paragraph number), which has therefore been added in a parenthesis at the end of the sentence. Because we can unambiguously derive from the example’s larger context that we are still talking about the same source (which, in this case, has been referenced with a narrative in-text reference in the previous sentence), we do not have to repeat that information here, allowing us to keep the name and year out of this parenthetical reference as well. To learn more about the difference between paraphrases and quotes, and which information to reference when, check out out pages on when and ow to paraphrase and when and how to quote.

ⓘ Note

The same strategy (of only including the locator in otherwise repeated parenthetical references) can be applied to cases where the source was originally mentioned in a parenthetical in-text reference, of course – as long as it is unambiguously clear which source in the bibliography you are referencing, and the previous reference is relatively close-by. A good rule of thumb is that if you’ve opened a new paragraph since referencing a source, you should probably include all the relevant information in your parenthetical (or narrative) in-text reference. When in doubt, however, it is better to play it safe and include all the information in the in-text reference.

Locator

A locator is a part of the in-text reference that allows you to pinpoint exactly where the quoted or paraphrased information you are referencing can be located in the source. In most cases, this will be a page number, but alternatives are available for sources that do not use page numbers. In the above example, for instance, the locator used is a paragraph number. For more information on locators, when they are absolutely required, and when they come highly recommended, and to learn more about alternative types of locators, please refer to out our page on page numbers etc.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the act of presenting someone else’s work as your own, or otherwise copying or building on the works of others without proper attribution. In our case, plagiarism can be prevented by always disclosing the texts and tools you have used to write your text, as precisely as possible, and otherwise following the best practices discussed in these pages. The unauthorised use of Generative AI (GenAI), and authorised the use of AI without proper disclosure, are also considered as plagiarism. In these cases too the work of others (here: GenAI) is misleadingly presented as your own. The general exception to this rule is your word processor’s integrated spellchecker, and its thesaurus function,2 neither of which need to be disclosed.

🛑 Danger

Plagiarism is a form of cheating, and will not be tolerated by your examiners. When your examiners suspect plagiarism, they have a duty to report this to the disciplinary board. This may lead to disciplinary actions, such as suspension or even expulsion from the programme. Outside of the safety net of the university’s learning environment, discovered uses of plagiarism (e.g., published in academic publication venues) may be met with even harsher measures and legal action. The university of Borås provides more information regarding what it considers plagiarism, and offers tools and guidelines on how to prevent it in your work.

References

Johansson, F. (2025). Ventures Towards an Authorial Avant-texte: From Print to Digital Environment. Variants. The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, (19), 15–36. https://doi.org/10.4000/15do1

  1. Some citation styles demand that authors add full-text references in the footnotes (abbreviated with ‘ibid.’ when repeating a reference), instead of combining in-text parenthetical references with a full bibliography. This practice is mostly confined to select disciplines in the traditional Humanities, however, and quite rare in the Social Sciences. ↩

  2. Please use the thesaurus function with caution. Words listed as synonyms are not always completely interchangeable, and some (otherwise correct) synonyms will also look wildly out of place when the register (or jargon) suddenly changes in the text. ↩