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LIBRARY: In-text/End-text Referencing

Quote Flowchart

Indirect quotations

An indirect quotation is one where paraphrasing has been used to acknowledge the ideas of the author.

When you paraphrase, you re-express the ideas of another in your own words. Quotation marks are not used, when paraphrasing, but you do acknowledge the author, the year of publication and the pages, if applicable. You can do this by including any part of this information within your own text and then placing the parts of the reference not included in parentheses, but within the same sentence. See the two example below.

  1. Moir and Jessel (1991) have shown that it is futile to maintain that the sexes are interchangeable.


  2. Moir and Jessel (1991, pp. 93-4) have shown that it is futile to maintain that the sexes are interchangeable.

Direct quotations

Direct quotation - within the text

The basic requirements are the author, date of publication and, if using a print text, the page reference. This is placed in parentheses (brackets) immediately after the quotation, but within the same sentence. NOTE: The period, ending the sentence, is outside the brackets.

Example: 

  1. "It is futile to maintain that the sexes are interchangeable" (Moir & Jessel 1991).


  2. "It is futile to maintain that the sexes are interchangeable" (Moir & Jessel 1991, p. 94).

Direct quotation - Short or Long quotations

There are different conventions depending on whether the quotation is short or long

  • Short quotations: Where the section to be quoted takes up less than three lines, or fewer than 40 words, the quotation forms part of your main text, but it is enclosed in quotation marks.

According to Gibbs (1981, p. 42) "a large part of examination performance is nothing to do with what students understand about subject matter." This being the case, it is important that education administrators re-assess the role of examinations in the education system.

OR

It seems evident that "a large part of examination performance is nothing to do with what students understand about subject matter" (Gibbs, 1981, p. 42). This being the case ...
  • Long Quotations: if the quotation is longer than three lines or 40 words, it should be set apart from the main text, so it can be easily identified. This is done by indenting the quotation from the left and right margin; without quotation marks; single spacing the extract.  It can be introduced by using a colon in the paragraph above.

If the author, date of publication or pages are not referred to in the text of your writing, they should be included with the quotation.

In discussing different approaches used by students in their learning Mathias (1978) points out that there can be no simple explanation for the differences found:

These behaviours did not represent static mental characteristics of students fixed in time, but rather could vary over time as the student moved through his course. It seemed more likely that a combination of factors were at work whose interaction and behavioural product was mediated through some process of interpretation on the part of the student. (p. 148)

 

Conventions

Inserting text into a quotation: use square brackets to indicate the text does not come form the original author. This is sometimes useful to show the context of the quotation.

Omitting text from a quotation: 

  • Within a sentence, an omission is indicated by three periods (ellipsis), with a space between each other and the preceding and following text.
  • Between two sentences an omission is indicated by four periods. (e.g. . . . .)
  • Do not use periods (ellipsis) at the beginning or end of a quotation.

Use of page numbers:

"Both Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy rejected indignantly the orthodox Victorian romance" (Moore, 1971, p. 176)
  • The use of page numbers is particularly relevant when citing a printed work, like a book, journal article or encyclopaedia.
  • The specific page numbers from where a direct or indirect quotation come from, should be shown in the in-text citation, but not necessarily in the end-text reference (depends on the type of resource).
  • If the whole work is being cited, omit the page numbers. e.g. (Smith, 1982)

Date: If you cannot establish the date of publication use n.d. (no date) Caution should be exercised when using a resource without a publication date.

Authors: 

  • If two or more works by the same author are cited at the same time, do not repeat the author’s name. Separate the years of publication by a comma.

  • If there are more than two works by the same author, published in the same year, add the letters ‘a’, ‘b’, etc. to the year to distinguish the works. Also add these letters to the year in the list of references at the end of the essay.

  • If there are more than three authors, list only the first, followed by ‘et al’ in the in-text citation, but use the full list of names in the end-text reference.