Why all the Fuss about Referencing?

I blogged for the library this morning. It’ll hopefully be of use to our new students 🙂 – you can read the text below.

https://whittakerlive.wordpress.com/2023/10/16/why-all-the-fuss-about-referencing/

You turn up to start a new university course, all ready to elevate your ukulele* performance to the highest possible level … and suddenly, you’re being told about referencing and citation, catalogue searching and note-taking, and you have a written assignment which terrifies the life out of you? How have things got so serious, so soon?

As you’ll have been told, it is very important that whoever marks your essay can see where you drew your information from. When you studied maths at school, your teachers probably told you to ‘show your workings’ (or some similar expression), right? Referencing is pretty much the same idea – they need to know how you arrived at your final argument, and which authorities informed your thinking. Referencing (some people call it citation) is how you show your workings in academia.

You’ll also have been told about the Turnitin software which can determine whether your submission is likely to be all your own work, or cut and pasted from various other sources without acknowledgement. Academic honesty is all-important. Using other folks’ work is not acceptable – and using AI such at Chat GPT is equally frowned upon.

‘Chat GPT can’t do referencing’

(said a colleague from another institution, in discussion)

Is this correct? In the spirit of scientific discovery, we decided to put this to the test. We wrote an ‘essay’ (well, a couple of paragraphs) containing some genuine references, but also some downright lies about pizza and curry! then asked Chat GPT to write a piece of prose with a bibliography.

• Chat GP entered into the spirit of the thing, and made up some titles in line with the nonsense we’d written!

Well, this wouldn’t be much good in an essay, would it? Made up titles? No publisher details? No, thanks. Perhaps, we thought, we had been wrong to TELL Chat GPT we were only playing with it.

• Removing the dates, we left incomplete references. Chat GPT completed every reference with ‘(year of publication and the title are not provided).’ That wasn’t much use either.

How could we get Chat GPT to produce a Harvard reference? Indeed, any decent reference?

• We tried a third time. This time, we left the imaginary essay out of it, and just gave Chat GPT five authors’ names and the years of their genuine publications.

Chat GPT was stumped! However, it was scrupulously polite in admitting it:-

‘I apologize, but I couldn’t find specific references or sources for the provided citations. It’s possible that these references do not exist or that they are not widely known in the academic or literary world. If you have any other questions or need assistance with different topics, please feel free to ask.’

Chat GPT, 16 October 2023

So, it’s true. You can’t get Chat GPT to write a Harvard reference! It might be tempting to try to use technology to help write your essay, but you’re seriously better off doing the work – and the referencing – yourself! You learn, your tutor sees that you’ve done the work, and everyone is happy. (NB The library can help you find resources to get your referencing right. It sounds complicated, but it’s really quite easy to get the hang of it. Look for the Ask a Librarian link on the catalogue home-page.)

*No offence intended to ukulele players!