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Law

Manuscript

Detail from the treatise known as Bracton, composed in the wake of Magna Carta, the most ambitious legal work from medieval England. (Image from the British Library)

Referencing

Referencing well will improve the quality of your academic work and help you avoid accidental plagiarism.

OSCOLA is the referencing style most commonly used in Law. 

The Library provides referencing guidance and resources. You can also contact your subject librarian with any questions you have about referencing.

Below are some key sources of guidance for referencing using OSCOLA

Referencing Management Software 

 

Reference management systems are time-saving tools that allow you to:

  • Collect and store references for the resources you read as you go
  • Manage and organise your references for different assignments 
  • Quickly add in-text citations into your assignments
  • Automatically generate a reference list from these in-text citations

More information about these can be found on our referencing pages.  All reference managers will require some small adjustments in some of the generated citations for OSCOLA. This guide provides further information on how to use OSCOLA with EndNote and Zotero.

Zotero is the reference manager that works most efficiently with OSCOLA and Law Resources. It is freely available. These tutorials on using Zotero with OSCOLA are a good starting point.

 

Law study skills

The Study Skills service offers support and learning materials to enhance your study and academic skills. These are co-created by students, lecturers and study skills experts. 

Law requires techniques of reading, writing, and speaking that are specific to the discipline. The library holds many resources to help you improve your academic skills at all levels of study and research. Below are some examples useful for Law: 

Cite Them Right Referencing Tutorial

Find out about the principles behind referencing and how to acknowledge the information sources that you use.

This tutorial is made-up of 11 short, self-contained topics, which you can explore and revisit at any time.

Content includes:

  • What is referencing and why it matters
  • What sources are appropriate to reference
  • How to avoid plagiarism
  • How to insert citations into your text