Library

Find journal articles, newspaper articles, book reviews etc.

To find relevant and good quality information for your work, searching databases is the most effective method. You have free access to a range of searchable databases though you may need your username and password to use some of them. Databases contain quality-assessed journal or newspaper articles on particular topics.

Databases

• Databases for Classics

If you would like some advice on searching for information, please contact me by email Richard.Bapty@glasgow.ac.uk or call 0141-330-6746.

You might find some resources useful for your dissertation which we don't have available from this Library. Through our Inter Library Loan service you can order books and journal articles free of charge. See the Need Something We Don't Have section on our website.

A general introduction to referencing is available.

Referencing and citing – using your sources

What is referencing?

Referencing is the acknowledgement of items you have read and used while creating a written piece of work for your essay, dissertation, article or thesis.

It is important to keep an exact and complete record of the details of all the sources of information that you use for coursework, essays, dissertations or publications. Sources can include books, journal articles, web pages and legal cases. If you don’t keep a precise record you will have difficulty (and a lot more work) when you need to list the sources in your reference list.

Citations

When writing an essay, report or dissertation, it is usual to cite [mention] the sources that you used, referred to, or took quotes from. These references might describe journal or newspaper articles, books, government reports, web pages

Citing accurate references is important for the following reasons:

• To give credit to concepts and ideas from other authors
• To provide evidence of the extent of your reading
• To use other work to support the arguments you make
• To allow the user to locate the cited references easily
• To help you avoid plagiarism

Which style of referencing does Classics use?

There are many styles for references, however, the most commonly used styles are Harvard (a version using author/date format) and Vancouver (numbered format).  

For detailed information, have a look at the Harvard Referencing guide from Leeds University.

Software for managing your references

There are a number of reference management software programs which help you to record and store references to books or journal articles and many other sources while you are working on a project. You can then use the stored information to generate bibliographies for your essay, thesis or article using a wide range of styles. The University supports EndNote. There are also a number of freely available pieces of reference management software.