Thursday, 15 September 2011

Referencing (sorry! But worth a read.)

Referencing is the great bug-bear of new students, and a serious distraction from what matters, which is content rather than form.

However. We refer to the accepted style as "Harvard" referencing. Even library guidance material does that. But that is just a label (which bemuses Harvard University, which has no connection with it.) for what is known across the pond--much more sensibly--as the "author/date" system. I'm not going to go into the details of this--it is all too easy to get sucked into them--but just to point out that it has two components:

  1. How to refer to your source within the text, and
  2. How to cite it within the bibliography.
#2 is the complicated bit. For those who care, the standard we adopt is "APA" (American Psychological Association). So (this is the bit which matters) they have a brilliantly helpful website:

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/09/best-of-the-apa-style-blog-fall-2011-edition.html

I have reservations about the amount of energy students are called upon to divert to this nowadays, but do learn to play the game, because it saves a lot of hassle down the line!