Acknowledging assistance in academic work

As part of good academic practice, you should be transparent about how your work was developed.

This includes giving appropriate credit to the ideas, words, data, materials and work of others through referencing, and acknowledging any assistance that has made a significant contribution to the work you submit.

You must cite and reference all external sources of ideas, information, data, images, words or other materials that you refer to in your work, using the referencing conventions required for your programme of study.

The Library referencing pages provide guidance for how to reference different sources, including generative AI tools and their outputs such as images, for Leeds Harvard and Leeds Numeric referencing styles. If your School's referencing style is different, check the official guidance for more information.

Where assistance has materially contributed to the preparation, development or refinement of your work, you should also include an acknowledgement that explains how that assistance was used. This helps demonstrate your approach to the assessment while making it clear that you remain responsible for the final submission. Your assessment brief may provide specific guidance on how to do this for a particular assessment.

Assistance you should acknowledge

You would normally acknowledge assistance that has:

• influenced the content, structure, analysis, interpretation or substantial expression of your work
• helped generate, develop or refine text, code, images or ideas
• substantially influenced your argument, structure, analysis or conclusions
• supported coding, statistical analysis, data processing or visualisations included in your submission
• contributed information, feedback or perspectives that informed the content of your work.

Assistance you do not need to acknowledge

You would not normally need to acknowledge:

• routine spelling, punctuation or grammar corrections
• a friend or family member identifying typographical errors
• a peer identifying formatting issues or minor language errors
• general study skills advice or support available to all students such as a Skills@Library 1-1 appointment
• teaching, supervision and feedback normally provided as part of your module.

Example acknowledgement

Unless the assessment brief specifies otherwise, acknowledgement of assistance should normally be placed at the end of your work before your reference list. An example of how to acknowledge assistance would be:

“In preparing this assessment, I used [technologies/person] to support [brief description of how the work was developed]. The assistance helped me to [identify themes, explore ideas, refine structure, review analysis, etc.]. I reviewed and evaluated all assistance used during the development of the work and remain responsible for the content of the final submission.”