Chapter 4 · Practice 3 of 3
Cite properly from the first draft
Why it matters
Pick the citation style your department uses (computing departments commonly ask for IEEE; some use APA) and use it from the proposal onwards. Fixing citations at the end of the year is painful and is where accidental plagiarism creeps in.
- IEEE: numbered citations in square brackets, such as [1], in the order sources are first cited. A source keeps the same number every time it is cited again, and the reference list is in numeric order.
- APA: author and year in the text, such as (Khan & Ali, 2024), with an alphabetical reference list.
Use a reference manager such as Zotero, or BibTeX if you write in LaTeX, so every source you read is saved with its details the moment you find it. Never paste a sentence from a paper into your notes without quotation marks and the source next to it.
Do
- Confirm the required citation style with your supervisor
- Save every source in a reference manager as you read
Avoid
- Copying sentences into notes without marking them as quotes