Referencing

Here is the first of a couple of catch-up blog entries. This one is going to discuss referencing and research.
The first part is how do you reference a website? At Whitireia we use APA Referencing. So to reference a website, say my blog, you would need the name of the web page,name of the website,year, month, day,year accessed, month accessed, day accessed and the URL. So an APA reference to this blog entry would look like:

 Referencing. (2009, April 30). Retrieved April 30, 2009, from pbjm00se’s blog: http://www.pbjm00se.wordpress.com. Here’s a handy tip, Microsoft Word has a form which you insert all your information into and it does the APA referencing for you.

No onto how do you know if a source is reputable or not. The problem with the Internet is that anyone can publish whatever they want, true or not. Sites such as Wikipedia suffer from this. Some of the information is correct and some isn’t. So your best bet to get reputable information of the Internet is to use either databases, such as Oxford Online, JSTOR or Proquest. Other sites that are reputable are University websites, Museum websites and newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Times.

Also make sure that check more than one source for your information. If several reputable sources are saying the same thing, you’re onto a good thing. Have a look at this article on Qualitive and Quantitive research. So if you’re doing any research soon remember not to just copy and paste from Wikipedia, useful as it may be at times.