MYP Design Referencing and Acknowledging Sources Notes

A Reference Is Directions Back to the Source

1. A reference exists so a reader can find the exact thing you used, which is why a bare link or the word "Google" fails the job.
2. Referencing works as two halves, an in text citation beside the borrowed material and a full entry in the bibliography.
3. The citation stays short so it does not break up the page, usually the author surname and year in brackets.
4. The bibliography carries the long version of each source and sits at the very end of the folder.
5. The academic honesty article in this unit covers the rules about using other people's work, so this article deals only with how sources appear on the page.

Put the Citation Next to the Borrowed Thing

1. The citation goes beside whatever it refers to, so nobody has to work out which sentence came from where.
2. An image is cited in the caption directly under it, like "Figure A2, moulded kettle handle (Hartley, 2023)".
3. A quoted sentence takes its citation straight after the closing quotation mark and before the full stop.
4. A figure, a measurement or a standard you looked up still needs a citation even though you wrote it in your own words.
5. A paragraph built from one source gets its citation at the start, then an obvious return to your own voice.
6. Five links dumped at the bottom of a page cite nothing, because they never say which fact came from which link.

One Pattern, Whatever the Source Type

1. Every entry answers the same four questions, who made it, when, what it is called and where you found it.
2. Add the date you looked at anything online, because web pages change and the version you used can disappear.
3. Keep one alphabetical list rather than splitting it into separate piles for websites, books and videos.
4. Write the full web address into the entry rather than hiding it behind a word like "here", since a printed page cannot be clicked.
5. Where no author is named, start with the organisation, and where no date is shown, write "no date".

Referencing an AI Tool Means Showing the Prompt

1. Treat a chatbot like any other source and name the tool, the version shown on screen and the date you used it.
2. Record the prompt you typed, because the question shapes the answer and a reader needs to see both.
3. Say what you did with the output, for example keeping three of nine suggested features and rejecting the other six.
4. Keep the conversation in an appendix and point to it from the page where that output changed a decision.
5. Check any figure a tool gives you against a source you can name, since the tool rarely tells you where its number came from.
6. An image generated by an AI tool needs the same treatment, prompt included, because the tool did the drawing.

Keep the Source List Running While You Research

1. Open a source list on day one and add a line every time you take something from anywhere.
2. Four columns cover it, the date, what the source is, the full link and the one thing you took from it.
3. Adding a line costs about 20 seconds, while rebuilding a bibliography from browser history costs an evening.
4. Number each source and write that number on the research page it fed, so list and pages stay tied together.
5. The finished list is almost your bibliography already, needing only alphabetical sorting and tidy formatting.

Pick One Style and Never Wobble

1. Most schools name one referencing style, often MLA or APA, so use the one yours asks for.
2. Repeating the same pattern matters more than which pattern you chose, because a reader can follow anything that stays consistent.
3. Set the bibliography in the same font and size as the rest of the folder rather than leaving it in whatever a citation generator produced.
4. Sort alphabetically by the first word of each entry, which is usually the author's surname.
5. Check the finished list against your pages once, cutting anything you never cited and adding anything you cited but missed.