Referencing

Previous attendees have said…

• 8 previous attendees have left feedback
• 100% would recommend this session to a colleague
• 100% said that this session was pitched correctly

Three random comments from previous attendees

• A very helpful session in how to reference. Useful resources to aid in referencing after the training sessions
• Useful, giving you the basics with choices of where to go for further info.
• Concise. Just the right amount of information. Presented well. Helpful links provided. Included some practical too.

Welcome

• this session is for 🌶🌶 intermediate users with some prior experience of academic writing

Session outline

• how and why to reference?
• referencing styles
• practice some referencing
• and talk about sources of referencing data, and strategies for managing your references

How and why to reference

• if you use a source in a substantive way when writing, include a short and stereotyped mention of that source (aka a reference) you should do this to:
• to show where an idea comes from - the scholarly breadcrumb trail
• to fend off controversy when introducing difficult ideas
• to save yourself work
• to avoid allegations of impropriety

Referencing styles

• there are lots
• no-one agrees which is best/correct/right
• pedants delight in the details, and you will often see minor differences in style in different places
• these details are irrelevant and pointless
• clarity and consistency >>> specific scheme trivia
• if in doubt, could you find your source from your reference?

Vancouver (AMA)

• each work is numbered by order of appearance
• use that number in the text as your citation: (2)
• ordered list of end-notes as your bibliography:

2. O’Neil C. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. London: Allen Lane; 2016.

Harvard

• each work gets a unique author-year identifier
• that identifier is used in the text as your citation: (O'Neil, 2016)
• bibliography ordered by first-author surname and year:

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. London: Allen Lane.

Which to use?

• Harvard
  • strengths
    • Allows pin-point referencing of single pages
    • Great when readers are likely to be familiar with some sources
    • Easy to troubleshoot
  • weaknesses
    • Verbose and distracting, particularly if you have lots of references in a single sentence - (3-11) rather than (see Smith, 1901; Smith, 1902; Smith, 1903)
    • Harder to create
• Vancouver
  • strengths
    • Concise
    • Great for short papers with comparatively few references
  • weaknesses
    • Bad for per-page pinpoint references
    • Ungainly for longer documents
    • Edits might necessitate renumbering

Practical

• here are some resources:
• a Knowledge Network link to a book
• a link to a concise Vancouver style guide from the University of Lancaster
• a link to a similar Harvard guide from Anglia Ruskin University
• please can you write a reference in both Vancouver and Harvard style?
• the in-text citation
• the end-of-document reference

Different types of source need different handling

• here’s a link to a (famous) journal article
• please could you repeat your referencing exercise using this different source?

Referencing tools

Word referencing

• many people just typing in references manually at the foot of the document
• this is probably the best way of working if you’re dealing with a very few references (say, less than 10)
• but there’s an inflection point at about 10 references, where the manual approach gets horrid

Word referencing how-to

• you’ll need the citation tools menu
  
• add a reference by Manage Sources
  
• select a reference style (APA is approximately Harvard)
• add in-text citations with Insert Citation
• add a bibliography with Bibliography

Pros and cons of Word referencing

• ✔️ quick and convenient
• ✔️ uses a familiar tool
• ❌ need to download dubious add-ons to change style
• ❌ bibliographic data needs manually-entering, and is hard to re-use

Refworks

• The Knowledge Network resources on Refworks

Bibtex

• FOSS- and code-friendly format for storing bibliographic data
• widely-interpretable

@article{oneil2016, 
  author = "Cathy O'Neil", 
  Title = {Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy}, 
  publisher = "Allen Lane",
  city = "London",
  YEAR = 2016, 
} 

• e.g. adding [@oneil2016] in Quarto generates a citation: (O’Neil 2016)
• and we’ll gain a bibliography at the end of the slides

Pros and cons of bibtext

• ✔️ powerful and flexible
• ✔️ allows you to manage large bibliographies with big serious tools (like JabRef)
• ❌ finding clean data is a challenge, and manual tidying is tedious
• ❌ for the code-friendly, or code-curious

Feedback and resources

• lots of decent, quick guides online
• if you really need chrome-plated precision about referencing:
  • The Oxford Style Manual
  • The Chicago Manual of Style

References

O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.”