References

You use references to indicate where a certain idea in you text originated from.

Intended for: BSc, MSc, PhD

References are a vital part of academic literature, since they serve several functions: 

• It places your work in the broader context of academic work, also pointing interested readers to related approaches. 

• It allows you to clearly demarcate your own contribution. 

• It provides credit to the authors who put effort in a certain idea. 

Length

The further you get in your studies, the more important references become. As a rule of thumb: 

• Report bachelor course: 0-5 references. 
  References optional, but usually follow material from the book (to which you do not need to refer). 

• Report master course: 2-10 references.
  References become more important. For basic courses (mostly following one textbook), references are still optional. For advanced courses (based on research papers), (some) references becomes necessary. 

• Research paper & master thesis: 1-2 pages.
  References are absolutely necessary. 

• Survey: 10-30 pages.
  Surveys provide an overview of a certain research field, and therefore typically come with very long reference lists.

Advice

• Use Latex: Do not manually generate your references (this will create a mess).

  • Instead, write your document in Latex, and manage your references through bibtex or biber.

• Style: Choose an appropriate reference style for your citations.

  • A good choice is ‘apalike’, which uses author-year citations (e.g., (Smith et. al., 2020)).

  • Other options are ‘plain’ (e.g., [3]) or ‘alpha’ (e.g., [Smi20]).

• Text versus parenthesis: Author-year citations (‘apalike’) can be used in two ways:

  • Parenthesis: with \citep{…} you can add a reference behind a statement. Example: “The same idea has been applied to text mining (Smith et al, 2020)”. 

  • Text: with \citet{…} you can add a reference within the text. Example: “Smith et al. (2020) developed a similar approach for text mining.”

• A reference is not a noun: Do not treat references as if they are nouns.

  • WRONG: “[6] show that this approach does not work.”

  • CORRECT: “Other work shows this approach does not work [6].”

• Code reuse: You also need to use a reference when you have used part of someone else’s codebase.

  • Clearly indicate which code you reused, and provide a reference to the public repository.

  • Note that is never a good idea to reuse code without understanding how it works. When we ask you questions about your report/work/thesis, you should without hesitation be able to explain what happens.