Parenthetical referencing

From MedBib.com - Medicine & Nature

Parenthetical referencing, also known as Harvard citation is a citation system in which in-text citations are made using parentheses, as opposed to footnotes. Full references are collected in alphabetical order by author's last name under a "references" or "bibliography" section at the end. There are two broad styles for the inline citations: author-date or Harvard referencing, which is primarily used in the sciences and regulated by groups such as the American Psychological Association (APA), and author-title referencing, which is primarily used in the humanities and regulated by the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Under the author-date method, the in-text citation is placed in parentheses after the sentence or part thereof that the citation supports, and includes the author's name, year of publication, and a page number where appropriate (Smith 2008, p. 1) or (Smith 2008:1). A full citation is given in the references section:

Smith, John. Playing nicely together. San Francisco: Wikimedia Foundation, 2008.

Parenthetical referencing is the preferred style of the British Standards Institution, the American Psychological Association, and the Modern Language Association (MLA).^[1] It is one of several systems recommended by the Council of Science Editors^[2] and the Chicago Manual of Style.^[3]

Origins

According to an 1896 paper on bibliography by Charles Sedgwick Minot of the Harvard Medical School, the origin of the author-date style 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 (Chernin 1988). 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 (Chernin 1988).

Chernin writes that a 1903 festschrift dedicated to Mark by 140 students, including Theodore Roosevelt, confirms that the author-date system 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." (Chernin 1988). 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 (Chernin 1988).

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".

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 authors are cited using "and" or "&": (Deane and Jones, 1991) or (Deane & Jones, 1991). More than two authors are cited using "et al.": (Smith 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 several books in 2005, the year of the first publication (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b and so on.
• 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.

Examples

Examples of book references are:

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

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:

• Smith, John Maynard. "The origin of altruism," Nature 393, 1998, pp. 639–40.

An example of a newspaper reference:

• Bowcott, Owen. "Protests halt online auction to shoot stag", The Guardian, October 18, 2005, accessed February 7, 2006.

An example of an article from an encyclopedia:

• Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906). Agricultural colonies in the Argentine Republic (Argentina). West Conshohocken: JewishEncyclopedia.com. Accessed: April 27, 2007.

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.

Pros & cons

Pros

• The principal advantage of the author-date style 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, author-date referencing can be simpler for the reader than flipping back and forth to footnotes or endnotes full of "ibid" citations.
• With author-date 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, Wikipedia's <ref> 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.
• Parenthetical referencing works well in combination with substantive notes. When the note system is used for source citations, two different systems of note marking and placement are needed---in Chicago Style, for instance, "the citation notes should be numbered and appear as endnotes. The substantive notes, indicated by asterisks and other symbols, appear as footnotes" ( "Chicago Manual of Style" 2003, 16.63-64). This approach can be cumbersome in any circumstances. When it is not possible to use footnotes altogether probably because of the publisher's policy, it results in two parallel series of endnotes, which can be confusing to readers. Using parenthetical referencing for sources avoids such a problem.

Cons

• The principal disadvantage of author-date referencing is that it requires more space.
• Because of its origins in the sciences, author-date referencing systems are less well-designed for arts and humanities disciplines, in which titles are more important than dates in the citations. Author-date systems lead to citations in the arts and humanities such as "Spinoza 2007: 34", where "Spinoza, Theological 67" (as in the MLA author-title style) would be more helpful. In empirical or scientific disciplines, dates are important to give an idea of the timeliness of a particular study or experiment, whereas timeliness is less of an issue in the arts and humanities (as the Spinoza example indicates). Moreover, in the arts and humanities, one is more likely to know the title of a work rather than its date (as opposed to the sciences, where it is common to refer to, for example, "the 2004 study by Jones, et. al.").
• The use of author-date systems can be confusing when used in monographs about particularly prolific authors. In-text citation and back-of-the-book listings of works arranged by date of publication can lead to frequent errors between works by the same author listed as, for example, Harvey 1996a, Harvey 1996b, Harvey 1996c, Harvey 1996d, Harvey 1995a, Harvey 1995b, Harvey 1986a, Harvey 1986b, and so on.
• In certain disciplines, works by important authors might be reprinted in various volumes, and so "Spivak 1985", "Spivak 1987", and "Spivak 1996" might all refer to the same essay—and might be better referred to as "Spivak 'Subaltern'" (as in author-title systems) and then arranged alphabetically by title in the list of references rather than numerically by date. (Again, this is an issue having to do with disciplinary differences between the sciences/social sciences and the humanities—a 1965 scientific study is unlikely to be reprinted in a 2006 journal given that its research will be out of date, whereas one might find a nineteenth-century article reprinted in a history or literature journal, in which case it would be absurd and confusing to refer to it by its more recent date, for example "the 2006 essay by Charles Dickens" or "Dickens 2006: 39"). This is resolved by referencing the edition actually used, and sometimes putting the earliest edition in brackets in the bibliography.
• 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 references sections, to see if the reference is used elsewhere in the article, and if not, delete the reference. This can be a complicated manual task, so articles that use Harvard referencing can end up with references that in fact are not used in the article. However, this task can be made simple with the Find function in modern web browsers accessed through CTRL-F or the use of some reference management software.
• 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.
• Parenthetical referencing breaks the flow of a sentence or essay. Other less intrusive references, such as footnotes or endnotes, do not.
• Parenthetical references are especially space-consuming and distracting when many references are made in a single place (which often occurs when reviewing a large body of previous work), whereas numbered endnotes can be combined into a range, e.g. "[27-35]" (which is automated by some citation software, such as the LaTeX cite package).

See also

• Comparison of reference management software

Notes

References

Further reading

• 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
• Birmingham City University (BCU), 2007, "Essential Harvard Referencing" (with usage examples for different types of sources).
• Anglia Ruskin University Library, 2008 "Guide to the Harvard System of Referencing"
• Harvard Style - referencing online sources
• Harvard Reference Generator - Tool that creates the correct format for various types of sources
• 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 bibliographies