Whenever you refer to another person's work in your own essay, dissertation or article you must acknowledge them and give full details of your source. You risk being accused of plagiarism if you fail to do so.
There are Things you can do to avoid plagiarism, as listed in the Library's general guide to Citing references with different citation systems.
Study Advice provide various guides to improving your writing style when supporting arguments with references. See Referencing and Academic Integrity, especially: Avoiding unintentional plagiarism, Quotes and paraphrases, Writing a precis or summary and Getting the most out of Turnitin. See also Using Turnitin as a feedback tool.
For further individual help you can contact your academic liaison librarian (contact details below) or make an appointment with a Study Adviser.
The Department of Meteorology recommends using the AMS style for citations. See your student handbook for more detailed guidance.
Note that AMS style requires that journal names are abbreviated. The following is a source of suitable abbreviations:
When you do your dissertation, consider using reference management software to organise and store references, then insert citations and build a bibliography in your Word document. The Library supports two reference tools in particular we think are accurate - EndNote and Mendeley. For information on these and other options see our guide to Managing references:
We also have specific a guide for using EndNote:
LaTeX is a tool you may have been advised to use to format your papers or other written work. If you use LaTeX you may also choose to use BibTeX as an alternative to Endnote for managing your references and inserting your citations.
Books about LaTeX can be found by searching Enterprise - you will need to refine by 'computer file'. A few are listed below.
The AMS webite has a FAQ for LaTeX authors.
LaTex beginner's guide by BibTex works with LaTeX to organise references and create a bibliography. You can use it on its own, but you could also use it in conjunction with reference management software. This may be especially appropriate if you have a large number of references or stored pdfs of academic papers.
Reference management software allows you to keep a 'library' of everything you consult. Typically you will need to set up an account for any program you choose to use, which will then store your references so that you can access them from various devices. They will also generate citations in a variety of styles. If you have downloaded pdfs you can link to them and usually read them within the program. Using Word, it also allows you to automatically reference as you write and build up a bibliography. Using LaTeX, it works differently - you would need to export your reference list to BibTeX.
The Library primarily supports EndNote software (see box above), but other programs exist and may work better with BibTeX. Some examples are:
There is a lot of information and help available on the web about all of these.
