At postgraduate level, students are required to formulate topics and research questions and to locate these topics within knowledge domains. This involves making intertextual links through referencing. An acadamic orientation course for international postgraduate students set out to teach the skills of referencing through a research paper task. A sample of six papers were analysed in order to determine how students were approaching the task of providing referential support for knowledge claims. This analysis is set in the context of the internationalisation of higher education and the implications of this for postgraduate students' academic writing are discussed.