Referencing is a systematical way to credit authors, painters, sociologists etc to their work or providence of information. It is also described as a way to explain where particular information has been sourced from. There are many types of referencing styles, including Harvard referencing format within essays or the likes of captioning found images by their producer, time, date etc legitimately.
One of the many reasons why we should use referencing is to give credit to the producer. If you had created a piece of work and someone for example used your piece of work to aid their own essay and had their work advertised, you would not receive any recognition for whatever they had used of your property. This could lead to missed opportunities, revenue loss, copyright infringements, a feeling of disrespect and most importantly; you simply wouldn’t be recognised for your hard work which has benefitted another person. An example of a good and often overlooked reference would be in a gallery space. A variety of work and images upon display are open to the public, not only is this a great opportunity for the artist to show off their creations but someone may want to study they creator more, therefore the likes of artist statements and captions are useful so that is easy to locate the source.
When somebody doesn’t reference, like stated earlier, lots of issues may arise. One large issue which comes with not referencing is plagiarism. Within the likes of essay academic essay writing, If a student or even an author submits a piece of writing where they have copied and pasted something simple as a sentence from online; the individual could be penalised for using somebodies information as their own. This can come with legal consequences also, the original source owner may have taken copyright acts out onto this piece of work meaning that if someone was to use it without their permission or credit they could potentially face a legal fine or more serious consequences. An often mistake of referencing is amongst students such as myself writing dissertations or other form of essay submissions not referencing their evidence, quotes or “copy and pastes”. This ends up with them being penalised or even disqualified from their qualification marking as it is legally classed as plagiarism. In September 2018 ITV reported that thousands of students where under investigation for misconduct, all including plagiarism within work and exams. They also reported that amongst students there was 7000;s reported cases of plagiarism in 2015/2016, where as there was only 6,600 in 2016/2017.
Finally, It is hard to always reference every single thing you write about. Sometimes its confusing when you’re talking about a subject and think that it must be referenced when it may not need to be. Im very aware of the fact I must be careful when writing in essays as I do not want this to not only happen to me, but discredit another artist for their work and yet give them the attention they deserved.
eleanor thorndyke 