Citing references

Plagiarism is taken very seriously in students' coursework. In the last decades, plagiarism checker enginees have developed rapidly and it's now a routine process (takes no more than 2 minutes) to scan online a document and get a detailed breakdown of the scores and the sources these were taken from. To be fair, it is unfortunately a "Big Brother" practice which didn't exist when I was an undergrad student (and which now suddently makes me feel much older).

Between "No referencing" and "Good referencing" lies also the "Bad referencing". And here is an example:

courtesy of King's College London (2018)

The student tried to communicate the fact that they found above equations on the lab manual, written by myself (Philippaki) and my partner in 2nd Year Labs crime Paco (Rodríguez-Fortuño). Besides both of us being flattered by taking credits on Faraday's law (Nobel Prize here we come), the result is bad. Because the purpose of referencing is not to show a bibliography (I've seen thesis with irrelevant citations just to make the reference list appear longer) but to acknowledge someone's intellectual property on which your coursework was based. In other words, if I read Schrödinger's equation on The Daily Telegraph, I'm not going to reference The Daily Telegraph but should search and find the original publication from Schrödinger himself. If I use a definition read on a book, I will reference the author of the book. And if I use an image found on a website, I will reference the website source (and date this was retrieved). Having said that, equations that are considered as laws of Physics don't always require to be referenced - that depends on your audience too, i.e. if your readers are scientists then you don't need to reference Newton's 2nd Law because this is "common knowledge".