When you're writing your assignments you're going to be reading lots,
and you're going to want to keep a note of all the books, journal articles,
cases, legislation, websites, tweets, all the information sources
you draw on in the course of your essay so that you can cite and reference them.
Failure to cite and reference your sources is plagiarism so we want to stay
far away from that!
If you've been asked to cite and reference
your sources in OSCOLA style, here's how to do it.
Step one is to find your style guide.
OSCOLA style has two parts,
and sometimes three: a tiny superscript number
that briefly interrupts the body of your text
to indicate a footnote, and it's essentially saying
here I am, drawing on something I've read here;
and then there's the footnote itself, which includes enough information
for anybody looking for your source to be able to find it.
Longer works like books and theses may also require a third part:
a bibliography, listing all your secondary sources
i.e. not cases or legislation.
Check with your lecturer
if they require this third element for your assignments.
A style guide will tell you exactly what your footnotes
and, if required, the references in your bibliography
need to look like.
The style guide we recommend for OSCOLA style here in DCU
is called 'Cite Them Right.'
To find Cite Them Right,
go to the Library website,
click on the 'A-Z databases' tab; click on 'c' for cite.
Choose Cite Them Right from the list -
you will be prompted for your DCU username and password
at this point.
Approach Cite Them Right according to the type of source
you want to cite and reference.
Cite Them Right covers most if not all information types;
it's fairly intuitive so go in and have a look for the one you need.
For example I can find out how to cite and reference books,
printed books, chapters or sections of edited books,
journal articles, websites, legislation, cases, and so much more
you get the idea.
Examples in Cite Them Right are UK-based,
but we can apply the same principles
in an Irish context.
As a cross check, I recommend you bookmark
OSCOLA Ireland Quick Reference Guide,
and because OSCOLA uses abbreviated forms of both legal sources
like law reports, and the names of courts, I suggest you also bookmark
the highly useful Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
Use it to decipher citations from elsewhere, and to correctly construct your own.
I'm going to show you how to correctly cite and reference a case
and then a journal article in OSCOLA style
using Cite Them Right as your style guide.
Irish cases may be reported in the Irish reports,
or the Irish law reports monthly, or both.
According to the second edition of the OSCOLA citation guide,
most Irish cases decided after 1998 have a neutral citation,
and some prior to that have been retrospectively given
a neutral citation.
You can check if a case
has a neutral citation or not by checking the website
of the Irish Legal Information Institute.
This case appeared in both a printed law report -
the third volume of the Irish reports in 2009, and it starts on page 745,
and it has a neutral citation: it was the 44th judgment
issued by the Supreme Court in that year.
Note that Irish reports has been shortened to IR,
and the Irish Supreme Court has been shortened to IESC -
those are the accepted abbreviations as laid out
in the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations.
If you wanted to refer to this case in an assignment,
here's how you would construct the footnote that includes
both the citation for the printed report and the neutral citation.
In Cite Them Right choose 'legal' and 'law reports'.
Now, Cite Them Right covers a number of different citation styles,
so choose OSCOLA from the drop down list.
As always with Cite Them Right, scroll to the examples
and these cover a number of different scenarios -
so the first one there is for a case
that appeared in a printed law report but there's no neutral citation.
If we keep scrolling, here is an example of how to construct
a neutral citation, and if we scroll right down to the bottom
we will find an example of a case that appeared both in a printed law report
and it has a neutral citation so we'll use this for our example.
Using the example on the left for guidance, we're going to use the box on the right
to format our footnote for our sample case in OSCOLA style.
Take their information out, put your own information in.
OSCOLA uses minimal punctuation, so be sure to leave any in that is there:
that's commas, brackets, as well as any italics,
this helps keep you right in OSCOLA style.
Copy ready for pasting into your own document.
That was how to cite a case in OSCOLA, we're now going to look at
how to cite and reference a journal article.
Say I use something I read in this journal article in my essay.
The information I'll need to record about this journal article
is that the author is Yvonne Marie Daly; the title is 'The Right to Silence:
Inferences and Interference' and this journal article appeared in
the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology in 2014;
in volume 47 issue 1 of that journal; and it can be found on pages 59 to 80.
This journal article also has a DOI.
We know that
OSCOLA abbreviates journal titles, so before we head into Cite Them Right
we need to duck into the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations
to check what is the accepted abbreviation for the Australian and New Zealand
Journal of Criminology - and there it is, 'preferred abbreviation ANZJ
Crim'
Back in Cite Them Right, choose 'journals > journal articles.'
And because we found this article online, we'll scroll down to e-journals.
Once again we're going to use the example on the left for guidance
and the box on the right to correctly format our footnote
in OSCOLA style.
Copy ready for pasting into your own document.
If it's required, go to the OSCOLA guidelines on the right side of the screen
to find out how to reference this journal article correctly
in OSCOLA style in your bibliography.
It's really worth spending some time reading the guidelines.
This is an excerpt from that page and you might want to bookmark it.
References in your bibliography are similar to footnotes,
with a few notable changes.
Surname goes first,
followed by initials; there's no space between initials,
and no punctuation either.
A footnote ends in a full stop,
but a reference in your bibliography does not.
Check out the guidelines for even more detail than this.
That was a very quick run through how to correctly cite and reference
a case and a journal article in OSCOLA style,
using Cite Them Right as your style guide.
There is so much more information within Cite Them Right,
we highly recommend you go in and have a closer look at it.
If you run into any problems, or have any questions, please get in touch.