Skip to Main Content

Adult Nursing

Support with your academic writing

Copyright Guidance

Copyright legislation protects creative ideas and publications and affects us all.  There are though several exceptions to copyright law in the UK which apply to information used for educational purposes.  These are known as fair dealing  and are set out in the Copyright at UWS guide:

Private study exception - allows individual students to copy extracts from material for their own reference purposes:

  • One article from any one issue of a journal.
  •  One chapter or up to 5% (whichever is greater) of a book.
  • One poem or short story of up to 10 pages from an anthology.

Non-commercial research exception

  • One legal case report allows individual researchers to copy extracts from material for their own reference purposes.

Quotation, criticism or review – allows students, researchers and staff to quote short extracts from copyrighted works in essays, reviews and journal articles.

  • A single extract of no more than 400 words.
  • A series of extracts of no more than a total of 800 words, with no single extract exceeding 300 words.

Creating accessible copies for disabled users – allows individuals to copy work in accessible formats (i.e. adapting work into braille or adding subtitles):

  • Personal copies of entire documents may be made provided for disabled learners as long as a copy of the document is owned by the institution, the author of the work is acknowledged and a statement is included that the copies are made under Section 31B of the CDPA.

[CDPA refers to Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988].

What is referencing and why do I have to do it?

Referencing is the method we use to acknowledge the work of other authors.

It serves three principal aims:

  • To support your arguments with evidence. Referencing demonstrates that your own arguments are grounded in a body of existing research and have been developed through an examination of the relevant literature.
  • Referencing is an important means by which we credit other authors for any ideas, arguments, quotations, and other forms of intellectual property which are not your own. Not providing an acknowledgement for the work of others is considered plagiarism (note that plagiarism can be both intentional and unintentional). You must always provide a citation when you use another author's intellectual ideas, whether you are paraphrasing (putting it into your own words), summarising, or directly quoting from the source.
  • Referencing shows the reader where they can access the original sources you have used (the evidence) to verify or fact check. It also helps the reader to carry out additional research of their own.

Referencing at UWS