Referencing and RefWorks
It is vital to fully and correctly reference any material you use, or you may be accused of plagiarism. You can find a good guide to referencing at this link:
Handbook on Citation and Related Matters by Dr Karin de Jager, as well as these links for other reference styles.
Alternatively, you can use the magic of RefWorks to have your referencing magically done for you.
The University of Cape Town subscribes to RefWorks. You can open an account on it and store any references you find on our book catalogue or on our journal databases.
Most of our journal databases allow you to save your references to RefWorks, you do not need to type them in by hand. You can also search our book catalogue from within RefWorks and download the book records to RefWorks.
You can then download a subset of RefWorks called Write-N-Cite, which will live on the desktop of the PC on which you write your papers.
Write-N-Cite does what its name implies - it allows you to cite as you type, by selecting the references from your RefWorks database. You can then generate a bibliography for your paper at the touch of a button, in any of a range of citation styles.
RefWorks can be found under the Research Help tab on the Library Home Page. There are good help files and tutorials on the RefWorks site, and the library staff in the Knowledge Commons,(the library’s own computer lab) are very good at helping people to use RefWorks. There is a really nifty library guide to using Refworks.
UCT staff and students can use RefWorks both on campus and off-campus (by logging in via EZProxy). RefWorks might ask you for a “group code” if you log in from off campus. Please call the Library Information Desk at 021 650 3703 for help with this.
Plagiarism is a dishonest act of attempting to take someone else's ideas, writing, design or research and presenting them as your own.
This is viewed very seriously by UCT and may lead to explusion. To avoid plagiarism, it is important to cite and reference your sources.
UCT's plagiarism policy and declaration form is available at Avoiding Plagiarism: a guide for students.