Referencing: Umbreen Ashraf

[Umbreen Ashraf]

I think, the first thing that comes to my mind is the referencing. That is something, which is really, really stressed over here and not as much stressed in Pakistan. It is taught to the students, but at graduate master's level, not at undergraduate level. So, they innocently end up plagiarising a lot of other people's work. And the stress over here is more on quoting with proper references. And, I think, that's a major thing that international students need to learn. And it's not that difficult either, you just need to get the hang of it. And there are so many online resources available, there's so many books available for that and you can just-- while you are studying, you can develop that habit of referencing everything.

Intellectually, everybody should be aware of the need of understanding the intellectual ownership of somebody's work. But that is not that much stressed in our country. And we believe that if you quote somebody who has already done some work and even if we repeat that person's words, we are actually honouring that person, that we are quoting his or her study. But this problem starts from where we don't actually attribute that work to a particular person or a particular organisation, which is a byproduct of their efforts and we need to acknowledge that. And it was a bit of a-- it was an idea which I struggled with for some time when I came here. And a lot of international students also struggle with that. And they can't seem to understand why they have to reference each and every sentence that the use of any other person.

And, I think, knowing the reasons behind doing that is more of a problem rather than learning to do it, because there are so many online reference guides that you can learn to use and there's this EndNote program which will do it autom-- almost automatically for you as well. But they need-- students need to-- especially, during the first semester, students need to make special efforts to understand the concept of plagiarism and referencing, and how does it work and how does it affect their future publications, their future academic endeavours.

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