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

• Referencing can be a really boring topic… but this was informative, easy to follow and practical with enough humour to keep you paying attention!
• Concise. Just the right amount of information. Presented well. Helpful links provided. Included some practical too.
• Helpful introduction explaining purposes of referencing and identifying two key styles for Health. Good real world examples and tips. Reassuring to know that use of italics or brackets is variation on a style and not definitive - OK to choose as long as keep consistent.

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.”