Harvard referencing

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For the use of Harvard referencing in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Harvard referencing

Harvard referencing is a format for writing and organizing citations of source materials. It is also known as the Harvard system, author-date system (Curtin University, 2007: 1), and parenthetical referencing (Perelman, Barrett & Paradis, 2000).

Under Harvard referencing, a brief citation to a source is given in parentheses within the text of an article, and full citations are collected in alphabetical order under a "References" or "Works Cited" heading at the end. The citation in the text is placed in parentheses after the sentence or part thereof, followed by the year of publication, as in (Smith 2005), and a page number where appropriate (Smith 2005, p. 1) or (Smith 2005:1). Then in a References section, a full citation is given:

Smith, John. (2005). Playing nicely together. St. Petersburg, FL (USA): Wikimedia Foundation.

Harvard referencing is the much preferred style of the British Standards Institution (1990), the American Psychological Association (APA Style 2001). It is one of several systems recommended by the Council of Science Editors (Scientific Style and Format 2006, intro)^[1] and the Chicago Manual of Style (2003).

Contents 1 Origins 2 Uses 3 How works are cited 3.1 Examples 4 Content notes 5 Pros & cons versus other referencing systems 5.1 Pros 5.2 Cons 6 Notes 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

[edit] Origins

According to an 1896 paper on bibliography by Charles Sedgwick Minot of the Harvard Medical School, the origin of Harvard referencing is attributed to a paper by Edward Laurens Mark, Hersey professor of anatomy and director of the zoological laboratory at Harvard University, who may have copied it from the cataloguing system used then and now by the library of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.^[2] In 1881, Mark wrote a paper on the embryogenesis of the garden slug, in which he included an author-date citation in parentheses on page 194, the first known instance of such a reference (Mark 1881, p.194). Until then, according to Eli Chernin writing in the British Medical Journal, references had appeared in inconsistent styles in footnotes, referred to in the text using a variety of printers' symbols, including asterisks and daggers.^[2]

Chernin writes that a 1903 festschrift dedicated to Mark by 140 students, including Theodore Roosevelt, confirms that Harvard referencing is attributable to Mark. The festschrift pays tribute to Mark's 1881 paper, writing that it "introduced into zoology a proper fullness and accuracy of citation and a convenient and uniform method of referring from text to bibliography."^[2]

According to an editorial note in the British Medical Journal in 1945, an unconfirmed anecdote is that the term "Harvard system" was introduced by an English visitor to Harvard University library, who was impressed by the citation system, and dubbed it "Harvard system" upon his return to England.^[2]

A strange feature of the 'Harvard system' is that according to Harvard's own Widener Library, "The Harvard system is something of a misnomer (Bourneuf n.d.)". In the UK and some of the Commonwealth of Nations, formerly the British Commonwealth, the name 'Harvard System' is widely used, but not in the university after which it is named. It has been said by a professor at Harvard that "It sounds like what we call the Social Science System".

[edit] Uses

Harvard is used mostly in the sciences and social sciences, with the first version of the APA style guide published as early as 1929 (Roediger 2004).

A similar type of referencing, known variously as the author-number, citation-sequence, or Vancouver style, has been used by British medical journals and the U.S. Council of Biology Editors (now Council of Science Editors). Scholars in the fine arts and humanities have traditionally preferred to use a "documentary-note" system. During the 1980s though, ease of referencing began to win out over tradition and in-text citations began to appear in the humanities, in the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook. In recent decades, most scholarly and professional organizations have adopted Harvard referencing.^[3]

[edit] How works are cited

The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the author's surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Smith example near the top of this article.

• The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The author's surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say: "Jones (2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery."

• Two or three authors are cited using "and" or "&": (Deane, Smith, and Jones, 1991) or (Deane, Smith & Jones, 1991). Six or more authors are cited using et al. (Deane et al. 1992).

• An unknown date is cited as no date (Deane n.d.). A reference to a reprint is cited with the original publication date in square brackets (Marx [1867] 1967, p. 90).

• If an author published two books in 2005, the year of the first (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b.

• A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself.

• Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as "Works cited" or "References." The difference between a "works cited" or "references" list and a bibliography is that a bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.

• All citations are in the same font as the main text.

• When citing an internet source, it is also required to provide name and place of the sponsor of the source, access date, and either full URL or just the main site details, in addition to the information of the author(s)/editor(s), year of publication and the document title. The citing source is preferred to be marked with a square bracket either as [internet] or as [online] to emphasize the non-printed version.

[edit] Examples

Examples of book references are:

• Smith, J. (2005a). Harvard Referencing. London: Jolly Good Publishing.
• Smith, J. (2005b). Dutch Citing Practices. The Hague: Holland Research Foundation.

In giving the city of publication, an internationally well-known city (such as London, The Hague, or New York) is referenced as the city alone. If the city is not internationally well known, the country (or state and country if in the U.S.) are given.

An example of a journal reference is:

• Smith, John Maynard. (1998). The origin of altruism. Nature 393: 639–40.

A newspaper article is usually cited in running text and omitted from the References section. An example of a formal newspaper reference is:

• Bowcott, O. (2005, 18 October). "Protests halt online auction to shoot stag", The Guardian. Accessed 7 Feb 06.

If the publication is offline:

• Bowcott, O. (2005, 18 October). Protests halt online auction to shoot stag. The Guardian.

[edit] Content notes

A content note generally contains information and explanations that do not fit into the primary text itself, but are useful for giving additional points of explanation about information in the text or information being referred to. Content notes are generally given as footnotes or endnotes. These content notes may also contain Harvard referencing, just as the main text does.

[edit] Pros & cons versus other referencing systems

[edit] Pros

• The principal advantage of Harvard referencing is that a reader familiar with a field is likely to recognize a citation without having to check in the references section.
• Another advantage is that if the same reference is cited more than once, even the casual reader not familiar with the author may remember the name. And when many in-text citations for different pages of the same work are used, Harvard referencing can be simpler for the reader than flipping back and forth to footnotes or endnotes full of "ibid" citations.
• With Harvard referencing, there is no renumbering hassle when the order of in-text citations is changed, which can be a scourge of the numbered endnotes system if house style or project style insists that first citations never appear out of numerical order. (Reference-management software can automate this aspect of the numbered system [for example, Microsoft Word's endnote system, or various applications marketed to professionals]; but many users either don't have the right software [e.g., the professional-oriented applications], or have it but don't know how to use it [e.g., Microsoft Word's endnote system].) Harvard referencing makes the renumbering problem moot.
• Author-date referencing works well in combination with substantive footnotes. When footnotes are used with endnote-style source citations, two different systems of note marking are needed: usually numbers for source citations, and other symbols, such as asterisks and daggers, for the substantive notes. This approach can be cumbersome in any circumstances; for unpaginated material it results in two parallel series of endnotes, which can be confusing to the reader. Using author-date citations for sources avoids the problem (Chicago Manual of Style 2003, 16.63–16.64).

[edit] Cons

• The principal disadvantage of Harvard referencing is that it requires more space, which is why the journal Nature, for example, does not use it^{[citation needed]}.
• Rules can be complicated or unclear for non-academic references, particularly those where the personal author is unknown, such as government-issued documents and standards.
• When removing cited sentences, editors must also check the Harvard references sections, to see if the reference is used elsewhere in the article, and if not, delete the reference. This is a complicated manual task, so articles that use Harvard referencing can end up with references that in fact are not used in the article.
• The system may be unfamiliar and distracting to a general readership, who are unfamiliar with journal articles. However, it is essentially easy enough to ignore the parenthetical citations, if readers are unsure as to the meaning of them.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• MIT. 2006. "Citing sources and listing references", in The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing.
• Comparison of reference management software
• Turabian, Kate L. (1996). A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. 6th edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-81627-3
• Curtin University, 2007, "Harvard referencing guide" (with usage examples).
• UCE Birmingham, 2007, "Essential Harvard Referencing" (with usage examples for different types of sources).
• Guide to the Harvard System of Referencing
• Harvard Style - referencing online sources

[edit] External links

• Harvard Reference Generator - Tool that creates the correct format for various types of sources
• Harvard Reference utility - A tool for creating reference lists
• Harvard Referencing Widget - Widget (Mac OS X) that creates references for academic works
• Document it - Document it works as a Microsoft Word Macro that creates reference lists and bibliographieses:Estilo Harvard de citas

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