If you are a postgraduate student at a university or college, you will most definitely be required, at some stage or other, to provide at least one, if not more, lengthy piece(s) of work reporting on your research that you have had to undertake in (partial) fulfillment of the qualification for which you are registered. Your research will, inevitably, entail you consulting numerous sources of generally published information, whose publication details you will need to supply at the end of the work, so as to avoid the crime of committing plagiarism (using other people’s work without acknowledging it as your source, so that you give the impression that it is your own work). Different universities and colleges use different referencing techniques, for which they usually provide extensive guidelines, so that their students and staff members can be consistent in citing their references, thus providing some uniformity in the pieces that they produce.

Being aware of the different referencing techniques that exist can also help you when writing a non-fiction book to choose an appropriate way of acknowledging both the primary and the secondary sources that you use when writing your text. Primary sources of information consist of such original documents as journals, spoken and written addresses, letters, interviews, oral and written records, and eyewitness accounts. The authors of such documents are personally involved in gathering the information, or data, that comprise the studies or reports that they produce. The authors can also, themselves, be outstanding individuals in their own right.

Whereas certain of the events that give rise to such material are extrinsic events of note, such as the September 11, 2001, Twin Tower attacks, which gave rise to countless eyewitness accounts, some primary material reflects the inner state of being of the author concerned, as, for instance, in the case of journals (which, however, may later be published, thus becoming secondary sources, as, for instance, in the case of the Belgian-American poet, novelist and autobiographer, Eleanore Marie Sarton, whose journals ultimately came to be published under the pen name, May Sarton). Due to the subjective nature of some of the material, referencing techniques have had to be developed to cater for the citing of unpublished records so that referencing can become a relatively complex task to undertake where the sources are difficult to retrieve.

Secondary sources, in contrast, consist of writing about an event or incident, or about conditions existing at a certain point in time, at which the author(s) was/were not personally present. An example of such would be an analysis of some historical event that happened prior to the author’s own lifetime. Many of the sources that you will use in writing non-fiction will tend to be secondary in nature, and, fortunately, such sources are comparatively easy to cite.

Whatever the source is that you use as a writer of non-fiction, however, it is imperative that you cite, or acknowledge, your sources in a manner that is coherent and consistent. In this way, you are not only verifying your reliability and veracity as a researcher, but you are also enabling your readers to obtain the first-hand material and other sources that they might find of (sometimes critical) importance to their own pursuits.