Research Skills

Producing a Project #1 - Referencing & Planning

Referencing

As you get down to the business of analysing and interpreting the meanings of all your primary and secondary source material (documents, reports, newspaper accounts, books and articles), as discussed in the last two chapters, you will be making notes towards your project report.

If you are not sure about note-taking, take a look at the information and suggestions in the Core Study Skills module on Note-Taking.

In this connection, it is very important to write down full references for all the material you use as you read each item. Then you can easily find particular parts of it again when you need to. And as you do that, you will also be building up your bibliography as you go along.

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A bibliography is a list of all the sources you refer to in your work which you will attach to the end of your report. It is a good idea to compile this in alphabetical order of authors' surnames. It is much better to build this list gradually, rather than leaving yourself with a lot of fiddly work to do at the end.

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Presenting references in a bibliography

When you make a reference to a book you note: author, date of publication, title, place of publication, publisher - and any other relevant information, such as the edition, the volume number, and page references for any quotations you make. It looks like this:

Potter, J. (1990) Independent Television in Britain; Volume 4, Companies and Programmes, 1968-1980, London, Macmillan.

A reference for a chapter in an edited book is made as follows:

Sparks, C (1994) 'Independent production', in S. Hood (ed.) Behind the Scenes: The Structure of British Broadcasting in the 1990s, London, Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 133-54.

And you enter an article in a journal in this way:

Kandiah, M.D. (1995) 'Television enters British politics: the Conservative Party's Central Office and political broadcasting, 1945-55', Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 15, no. 2, June, pp 265-84.

There are variations in ways of referencing and you may be advised to follow a slightly different layout. But however you do it, you should always provide as much information as you can.

A good website for examples of bibliography layouts for all sorts of sources is: http://www.sac.sa.edu.au/Library/Library/Bibliography/bibliography.htm

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Whatever style of referencing you use, what matters is that you always make the references in the same way throughout. You should also keep your references together in one place as you work (in a note-book or spreadsheet) so that you don't lose anything. You'll have to keep your source material and notes well organised too, or you will waste a lot of precious time hunting around for things.

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Planning

Towards the end of this research phase you should be starting to make an outline plan for your project report and even be drafting sections of it as they begin to take shape in your mind.

And, as the deadlines for your active researching stage approaches, you will simply have to call a halt to your investigations. Whatever your topic, there is always more material than you can handle in the time available. You must be ruthless about keeping to your schedule.

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This page was adapted from: Chambers, E. & Northedge, A. The Arts Good Study Guide, (1997) The Open University, Chapter 6, p. 228-9