 Scholarly arguments are built on evidence, which means when you're reading journal articles, books and other academic sources, you're going to see a lot of references. This can lead to confusion, as it can be difficult to know who you should be referencing if you want to include information in your own assignments. Often your lecturers will tell you that you should always reference the primary source or the original source of the information, and this is true in some instances. In others, you may end up tracking the evolution of a theory back through time, which isn't really necessary. So how can you decide? Let's have a look at a couple of examples. This paragraph is taken from a journal article published by Chow and Low in 2011. At a glance, we can see that it contains a number of references. My assignment instructions tell me that I'm allowed to use research from the last 10 years, but I can see that all of the references in the article are older. So who do I need to reference? You should always reference the primary or original author in a few situations. One, when their exact words have been used in the article you are reading. In other words, they've been quoted. Or two, when specific results from research is being communicated, or a theory which they are responsible for. Outside of these scenarios, the information you are reading is the responsibility of the authors who wrote the article. It's their narrative, their interpretation of other people's research. They've translated it and packaged it for you, so you should be referencing them. So let's return to our paragraph. There are no quotes, so we know that the wording is Chow and Low's. No specific research is communicated, and particular theories are not discussed. In this instance, the references are providing supporting evidence for the argument that the authors of the article are making. If we were using any information from this paragraph, we would reference Chow and Low. Let's look at another example. In this journal article, published by Gonzalez Ramirez in 2019, the references are indicated by numbered citations. We can see that the majority of this paragraph is the author recounting a study conducted by Wells. If we wanted to reproduce this information in our own assignment, we would need to either locate the Wells study, using the information found in the reference list and reference it directly, or follow the example for authors citing other authors found in the in-text citations explained section of the library's referencing guides. Never reference an article you haven't directly read. If we read about Wells' study through Gonzalez Ramirez's article, we're reading her interpretation of that research. If you include this interpretation in your assignment but reference Wells only, you're plagiarizing the work of Gonzalez Ramirez. If you can't access Wells' original article, you should use a secondary citation to acknowledge the work of Gonzalez Ramirez in introducing you to the research. For more writing and assignment tips, check out our Uniskills guides.