Referencing

skills

intermediate

Published

August 5, 2024

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

Concise. Just the right amount of information. Presented well. Helpful links provided. Included some practical too.
Great intro / refresher on referencing - been so long since uni (where, along with my degree, I obtained a certificate of proficiency in Word 3.1!) that digital referencing is a whole new world to me. Useful links to additional materials as always too.
A very helpful session in how to reference. Useful resources to aid in referencing after the training sessions

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:

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.”