Referencing plays a key roll in properly crediting people's work when being sourced from and used, ensuring academic integrity is maintained.

Different journals and organisations will use different referencing style sand standards but each aim to provide enough information for you to be able to easily identify and access the original piece of work. Each source media will also require slightly different referencing requirements for example a scientific journal reference will contain very different information to that referencing an online video.

Information can be found on publishers individual websites on their individual referencing style for examples the RSC which is the department of chemistry's preferred referencing style, the universities library also provides skills guide on referencing styles and how to reference correctly.

An example RSC style reference is as follows;

Tracy D. Nixon, Lee D. Dingwall, Jason M. Lynam and Adrian C. Whitwood, Chem. Commun., 2009, 2890-2892.

As you can see the Journal Title is abbreviated, this is common in referencing to limit the length of the reference. The ACS provides a tool that aids in finding the official abbreviation of a journal title, or equally finding the full name of a journal from its abbreviated form.

Formatting is also important in scientific communication along with referencing, further departmental information on formatting style and referencing can be found in the depatmental style guide

Researchers will often have a large number of sources of information used throughout individual pieces of work and thus proper management and record keeping of sources is important, to ensure no information is lost. In its simplest form this can just be a list of references but often people will make use of reference managers. 

A variety of mangers are available e.g Zotero, EndNote and PaperPile and each can be used to store, format and write references. The library provides subject guides on reference management along with information on PaperPile the universities recommend web based reference manager