Foundations for Professional Health Practice

Academic writing skills

The UniSkills platform is designed to help improve your academic assignment, study, numeracy and digital skills.

  • Reading and Note taking introduces you to reading and note taking techniques, how to read critically and evaluate your sources.

  • Writing introduces you to assignment structure, academic style, and the elements involved in essay writing.

  • Integrating sources guides you through the basics of paraphrasing, summarising and quoting in your academic work.

  • Before submission provides guidance on editing and proofreading your assignment.

Referencing

What is referencing?

Referencing is a standardised method of acknowledging sources of information and ideas that you have used in your assignments, in a way that uniquely identifies their sources. Direct quotations, facts and figures, as well as ideas and theories, from both published and unpublished works, must be referenced.

Why reference?

  • Acknowledges the works of other researchers and helps avoid plagiarism
  • Provides evidence to support the arguments that you are making in your assignment
  • Shows the credibility of your sources and strengthens your arguments
  • Allows other readers to be able to find the exact source you have used

APA 7th referencing guide

For this unit you will need to reference your sources using the Library’s APA 7th referencing guide. The guide contains examples of in-text citations and reference list entries.

Learn how to reference tables and figures (any type of illustration or image e.g. graphs, charts, maps, drawings or photographs) in the APA 7th style.

See our handy checklist which highlights some points to pay attention to when editing your in-text citations and reference list.

See an example of a reference list produced in the APA 7th style.

Provides style and grammar guidelines for APA 7th. Includes a blog with tips for using the style.

Provides guidance on referencing Gen-AI content in the APA style

Authors citing other authors (secondary citation)

It can be confusing to know who to give credit to when you are referring to a scholarly source in your assignment. Scholarly sources often include many in-text citations to provide supporting evidence for their research. In most cases, you only need to provide an in-text citation and reference list entry for the source you are using. However, there are some instances where you need to provide credit to the supporting source.

Watch this video for more information: Citing secondary sources

APA referencing quiz

This short interactive tutorial and quiz should take 10-15 minutes to complete.