Possibly the most important part of research is acknowledging your sources. This allows readers the opportunity to trace your ideas through the web of knowledge, uncovering further details, testing the usage of that source in order to validate your claims, or simply to find more fun stuff to read. Plagiarism is the most serious academic crime a researcher can commit, so acknowledging sources is mandatory.
Referencing generally consists of two parts. First we need an inline citation whenever a quote or idea is borrowed from another writer. Second, we need a reference list that gives the reader all the information they require to locate the source.
In the following I will compare popular referencing styles and explain why I use none of them. Or rather: I use a combination of the best qualities of these, in order to guarantee simplicity, consistency, and clarity. Referencing should be as readable as possible, simplifying the tasks of both writer and reader.
Different disciplines have different ideas about how to format references, resulting in many extant styles. Here’s an incomplete list of those that I’ve encountered.
- APA (American Psychological Association): used in Education and Psychology
- MLA (Modern Language Association): used in the Humanities
- Chicago/Turabian: used in the Fine Arts and History
- Harvard: a more generalised author-date style, a variant of which is used at my home university, the University of Limerick
- IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers): used by various computing and engineering organisations including the ACM.
The utter stupidity of IEEE style
I just completed a paper for publication using IEEE and experienced an extraordinary amount of discomfort at just how inane this system is. Other styles have inline citations that make sense in context, as they obviously should since that is their entire purpose. But IEEE simply indexes each citation with incrementing integers. So you might write:
Smith [1] has argued this but Jones [2] has argued that.
The reference list is then a sequence in the order the references were encountered in the text. This method has numerous problems.
While writing, it is often that case that blocks of text are re-ordered, inserted, or deleted. That is the very process of writing, after all. This integral process requires renumbering some or all references. Your word processor might handle this automatically, depending on the formatting required. Though the process is far more arcane than it should be because word processors suck. (That's a different article.)
For the reader, the reference numbers give no indication of context. You need to flip between the passage and the endnotes to determine even the simplest fact: who is being cited here? Meanwhile the reference list itself loses functionality. Rather than alphabetic order the sequence is arbitrary, based on when the source was mentioned in the text.
Worse yet, repeated citations of the same source results in repeated items in the reference list, assuming that you wish to specify exact page numbers (as you should). This is unnecessary clutter.
Finally, this style does not readily support footnotes, since then you would have two different numerical indicators in the text. Instead, any such tangential remarks must be included in the endnotes... which now serve two functions.
Parenthetically, I wonder why computer journals don’t start the numbering at zero. Ah yes, a small joke.
The better way
The remaining styles all use some form of inline citation that identifies the source without use of an arbitrary index number. Hence they avoid all problems the writer might have with synchronising text and references. This is also easier for the reader, reducing how much flipping between text and reference list is required. So far, so good.
Here are the most popular formats for comparison:
MLA (Eight Edition): (Parmar 11)
APA (Seventh Edition): (Parmar, 2022)
Chicago/Turabian: (Parmar 2022, 11)
Harvard/UL: (Parmar 2022, p.11)
The first two citations do not include enough information to identify the source. MLA omits the publication date, which is annoying in the case of multiple publications from one author. Of course we can reintroduce a date in these cases, but then we have inconsistency. Worse yet, APA has no provision for a page number, which I find completely bizarre. Meanwhile, Chicago and Harvard styles include all necessary information, though Harvard introduces an arbitrary page number prefix. We don't need that little "p." to know the number indicates a page.
Here my preferred style conforms with Chicago. It is simple, clear, and complete.
Turning to the reference item itself, we have the following entries for a monograph (single author book).
MLA: Parmar, Robin. Listening to Places: Exercises Towards Environmental Composition. Void Gallery, 2022.
APA: Parmar, R. (2022). Listening to places: exercises towards environmental composition. Void Gallery.
Chicago/Turabian: Robin Parmar, Listening to Places: Exercises Towards Environmental Composition (Derry, Northern Ireland: Void Gallery, 2022).
Harvard/UL: Parmar, R. (2022) Listening to Places: Exercises Towards Environmental Composition, Derry, Northern Ireland: Void Gallery.
Chicago indexes by first name, which makes zero sense. No-one I’ve ever met in library sciences would let this pass without scoffing, so I wonder how this style ever got accepted? Some styles introduce parentheses and extra punctuation where they are not needed. Or the data fields are presented in an order that encumbers sorting.
For contrast, here's my preferred style, a variant on the Harvard author-date format.
Harvard/Parmar: Parmar, Robin. 2022. Listening to Places: Exercises Towards Environmental Composition. Derry, Northern Ireland: Void Gallery.
So, what are the differences?
- The author’s preferred spelling of their name is used. Abbreviating or otherwise changing someone’s name is inappropriate. Furthermore, it can be confusing in the case of multiple writers with the same last name and initial. This happens rarely but why create a potential problem with an arbitrary change to the existing information?
- The date is included as the second field, to order the reference list chronologically under each author. If the author has more than one publication in a year (the busy little bee!) then a letter suffix can be appended to the year, resulting in 2022a, 2022b, and so on.
- Parentheses are removed from the date, since this is truly extraneous.
- Punctuation is standardised so that each element of the data is separated by a period. This allows each field (name, date, title, publisher) to be clearly read off the reference.
A more complex case
Now to format a journal article. Here I have created idealised versions of four styles. I say “idealised” because one thing that often gets lost in practice (that is, when using using library tools) is the italicisation of the composition within the name of the article. For correctness, this needs to be preserved.
MLA: Parmar, Robin. “The Garden of Adumbrations: Reimagining Environmental Composition.” Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology, vol. 17, no. 3, Dec. 2012, pp. 202–10.
APA: Parmar, R. (2012). The Garden of Adumbrations: reimagining environmental composition. Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology, 17(3), 202–210.
Chicago/Turabian: Robin Parmar. “The Garden of Adumbrations: Reimagining Environmental Composition,” Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology 17.3 (2012): 202–10.
Harvard/UL: Parmar, R. (2012) ‘The Garden of Adumbrations: reimagining environmental composition’, Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology, 17(3), 202–210.
Using the criteria of consistency and clarity we can decide on the best approach. Each decision conforms to one or more styles (which I will indicate in parentheses) but the aggregate is different from all of them. For completeness the first three items are repeated from the previous list.
- Write out full author name as credited, last name first (MLA).
- Put the date after the author’s name for consistent indexing (APA and Harvard).
- Use periods between each data field (MLA and APA).
- Use sentence case for a short work (e.g. article) and title case for a longer work (APA and Harvard). This makes the items easier to distinguish, especially in plain text, where italicisation is not available.
- Use double quotation marks around article titles to avoid confusion with apostrophes (MLA and Chicago). If nested quotes are needed, use single quotation marks.
- Write volume and issue numbers simply without prefixes (Chicago). A period between these is the easiest way. There is no need to include redundant month of publication or other indicators of the issue, unless that issue was not assigned a number.
- Write page numbers simply without prefixes. Do not introduce a new symbol for this, e.g. the colon (APA and Harvard).
- Don't abbreviate the second term in a page range (APA and Harvard). This saves only a tiny amount of space at the cost of potential confusion.
- If a field needs to be subdivided even further, for example in the case of multiple authors, use a semi-colon as delimiter.
Here is the entry using my system.
Harvard/Parmar: Parmar, Robin. 2012. “The Garden of Adumbrations: reimagining environmental composition.” Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology 17.3, 202–210.
I believe that this result is provably superior to the styles in general use. Though I welcome other opinions in the comments.
Further comments
I have noticed in the course of writing this article that my preferred format is not entirely consistent. The page reference is not part of the publishing information, so there should be a period before this field. But such formatting might get confused with the notation used for the issue number… and also it looks unnatural somehow. But I must admit the problem!
It has become normal to include a DOI or other link at the end of a reference. This saves time for the reader but clutters the list, so I prefer to avoid including these. An exception is made for works that are online by nature (a web page or preprint on an author's website) and hence is not readily be indexed for retrieval by a database or library catalogue.
Punctuation goes within the closing quotation mark. This is not so much a matter of style as it is of typography. With a proper layout engine (that is, not a word processor!) this will produce more handsome output. Admittedly it contradicts the logic of computing, which mandates consistent delimiters positioning. Aesthetics over logic, in this case.
When a book has been reprinted long after its initial publication date this can look quite odd in a reference list. Darwin is still not alive and publishing in 2024! In this case I will put the original date of publication in parentheses after the publication that I am referencing. This is not part of any existing style, admittedly. But it adds useful information for the reader and helps preserve historical context.
Conclusion
I devised my system while a Masters student but was worried about acceptability. So I consulted the head librarian at the University of Limerick, who had led the project resulting in the reference guide Cite it Right, which mandated the Harvard/UL style illustrated above. She concurred that my approach was perfectly correct and viable. The only barrier to use was whether my lecturers would accept it.
So there you are. It’s about acceptance at the end of the day. Don’t use any style that might annoy your superiors. But when you can, use the simplest possible.
In the meanwhile I will curse editors and publishers who force arcane syntax on a struggling mind such as my own.
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