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Dear Student, For every assignment that you write and submit, our discipline requires the following: (i) a well-written bibliography at the end of such a work, indicating all the sources you have consulted in the writing of your assignment, including those that you did not cite in your body-text but which influenced your work AND (li) carefully ordered references or source notes in the body-text of your work, indicating the name of the author(s) whose ideas you are referring to, the ear in which the publication you are referring to was produced and the page number(s) in the publication from which the ideas are borrowed. It is important for everyone concerned that such references in assignments have a uniform style. For us, uniformity of referencing has the advantage of facilitating supervision.
For you, it means mastering a technique that could save you much trouble in later research and publishing. philosophy authors, whether beginners, post-graduate students, or professional philosophers, sooner or later have to supply references. Also, those who read and study philosophy, must be familiar with reference systems so that they can understand the references and, if necessary, follow them up. There are many different reference systems. The system used in the Discipline of Philosophy is the Harvard System (with slight modifications). The following publication, Burger, M. 1992, Reference techniques, 8th revision, Pretoria: Unisa, pp. 1-76, forms the basis for these notes.
This publication can be obtained from The Business section, publishing services, unisa, po BOX 392, UNISA, 0003. In this tutorial letter we provide hints on the use of references in your own written work. Therefore we confine ourselves to a single system. However, in your readings you will come across different reference systems. We, therefore recommend very strongly that you take note of the different techniques discussed by Burger. The appendix at the end of this tutorial letter provides a self-test on reference. This raises two questions, namely, Why refer? and, Why have one fixed technique for referring?