Referencing your sources 
It's important to correctly reference all your sources referred to in your writing. Reasons for doing so are:
- Shows how widely you have read;
- Enables the reader to locate the sources you've referred to;
- Supports and strengthens your arguments;
- Demonstrates academic integrity;
- Credits the original author(s) for their work
Deakin's Referencing Guide shows you how to correctly format all your citations and references.
Have a referencing question? Ask the Study Support Team.
Planning your search
Before you begin looking for resources for your assessment or project, focus on planning your search strategy. A little time spent on this now will save you time and frustration later. Here are the steps:
Summarise your question or topic
This sounds obvious, but to begin searching you should be clear about the topic of your research or assessment.
If this is for an assessment, ensure you review your assessment instructions. You may already have received a topic, a statement or clues to guide your search.
So write down your summary and check that it's clear and focused.
Advanced search techniques
Use these advanced search techniques to improve your search results.
Phrase searching narrows a search to show results that contain an exact phrase.
This is useful when you want to search for a certain string of words.
To conduct a phrase search, add double quote marks around two or more words you want to search for.
For example: searching for "portrait photography" will only return records that contain this exact term. The search will not return results where the word "portrait" or "photography" appear separately.
Useful keywords for searching might include:
- motion picture*
- film critic*
- motion picture production & direction
- screenwrit*
- directors and directing
- cinematograph*
- film edit*
- animated film*
- computer animation
Try Advanced Search for more precise results -
In the above search, we included the film title, and director's name. Psych* will search for all word endings after the * - ie psychology, psychiatry, etc.
Usually, searching via the film title or director is a good starting point. Sometimes, for more contemporary films or less well known films or directors, there may only be a few academic articles or books published about that film or filmmaker. In these cases, you will need to find articles and books about similar films or themes, and apply these to the film you are analysing or writing about.