Q. How do I anonymise an organisation or institution's name, e.g. a school or company name, when using information from the organisation or institution’s document?

If you are citing from an institution, company or organisation document (either an internal document or one that is publicly available on their website) you may need to anonymise it, for example, for confidentiality purposes.

 You should discuss with your tutor and the company/organisation regarding the inclusion of such documents, especially internal documents.

 You have two options:

1)

Add the document or part of it as an appendix, blanking out the name of the institution/company/organisation. You will need to check with your tutor or department who will be able to advise on what content should be added to your appendices. If they advise this is the best option, when referring to information from the document in the main body of your work you would not need to enter the usual citation and instead refer the reader to your appendix by entering, for example (see Appendix A). You would add a suitable description of the document in the appendix itself, but would also anonymise the institution/company/organisation.

 The suggested format for this would be as follows:

[Organisation/company/institution] A. (2018) [Organisation/company/institution A's] title of document. Manchester: Organisation/company/institution A. 

For example:

School A. (2018) School A assessment policy. Manchester: Organisation/company/institution A.

You may be advised that adding the document as an appendix is not required and instead you can cite and reference it even though the reader/tutor will not have access to the information and/or they are unable to verify all of the information you have used in your work.

2)

If your tutor advises that adding to an appendix is not required, and that you can cite and reference the document as usual (albeit anonymising any company information so as to make them unidentifiable), we would suggest following the following format for anonymising:  

 Any citation linked to this document would use the format, for example: (School A, 2018)

 The reference elements required would be as shown in the example above.