Mostly all your assignments need to be referenced to showcase that you have undergone secondary research. Regardless of the referencing style, your assignments include a reference list included at the end of your work and in-text citations through the text. While reading each journal article or book chapter is very consuming, this blog will teach you a technique you can use to promptly go through your work and reference along the way. The multiple steps outlined only work if you are somewhat informed about your topic and what it entails. If you lack such knowledge, we suggest you read up on it and form an understanding of its general facets. 

For example, if your topic is quality of working life, the aspects included in this topic entail job satisfaction, control at work, workplace environment, etc. Breaking down the topic into multiple fields allows you to form a general understanding of the topic. You can leverage this if you are afforded the freedom to choose your topic. If not, research the topic briefly and understand the topics listed under the main topic as these would generally form your subsections. It is also critical for you to go over your course material related to the topic and read them well also. These can be a general background or entail keywords for you to base your research upon. 

Once these steps are completed, you can start writing your work based on the brief research and the understanding you formed. Once you established a certain level of knowledge about the topic, you can start writing ideas based on these without the need to research every sentence or word. For example, once you have read briefly about customer segmentation, you can write:

Customer segmentation is an important marketing tool utilized by marketers to break down the market into defined and heterogeneous segments with distinct characteristics. 

As you would need to reference this sentence since you did not come up with the definition, we recommend that you follow each sentence similar to this one with “(REF)”. 

Customer segmentation is an important marketing tool utilized by marketers to break down the market into defined and heterogeneous segments with distinct characteristics (REF).

Apply this to all sentences that would need to be referenced. This serves as a bookmark to highlight the sentences that you need to reference later. This is where having knowledge about the topic is critical as it allows you to flow through sentences quickly and write a paragraph seamlessly. Once you have completed at least one section or subsection, go back to the bookmarks you left in the text and start looking for references. 

Open Google Scholar in a window next to your text document and pick the keyword from each sentence. For the aforementioned sentence, the keywords would be “customer segmentation.” Type it in the Google Scholar search bar and change the date filter to 2018 to get recent research results. Click on the quotation mark underneath each result to obtain the reference automatically. Copy and paste in your reference list and place the in-text citation instead of “(REF)” to fill the bookmarks you left with credible sources. You can do this with a degree of confidence only if you are familiar with your topic which is why we recommended that you dig up information about it before you start writing to be able to write quickly and finish your assignments promptly.