In the first referencing post we introduced referencing and why it is important. Today, we need to learn what references actually look like.
Style Guides and Ways of Referencing
Style Guides are the document which tell you what your references should actually look like. There are thousands of these, and each contains hundreds of pages of thick, condescending pedantry. Luckily for us, only a handful of guides are widely used, and we can skip straight to the References section in these. Most courses at the Academy for Distance Learning use the Harvard Style.
The Style Guides can be divided by how they cite sources. There are “inline citation”, “number only”, and “footnote citation” guides. For example, let’s pretend we wanted to cite that first referencing blog post from two weeks ago:
1. Inline citation: These styles put citations in the main text of the document inside brackets. Good examples are Harvard and APA referencing which both cite like this: (Raye, 2016). MLA referencing is very similar, but does not include the date: (Raye). All three of these systems will add a page number if we are quoting a book (Raye, 2016, p.2).
2. Number only: Instead of including any information at all in the citations, these styles just include numbers in the text which refer to a source. For example IEEE would give [1], and AMA would give.¹ These numbers are not footnotes like type 3, they correspond to unique items in the Bibliography.
3. Footnote citation: These styles give all the information about the item in a footnote. A good example is the MHRA style which looks like this.¹ The Chicago full-footnote style looks similar but does not need an access date in the footnote.² With these style guides, after the first time you cite something you use a simplified footnote, since you’ve already given the information once, like this.³
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Lee Raye, "Academic Referencing - What Is It And Why Should You Care?", ADL, 2016 <http://adlonlineeducation.com/blog-academic-referencing-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care-8.aspx> [accessed 22 March 2016].
² Lee Raye, "Academic Referencing - What Is It And Why Should You Care?", ADL, 2016, http://adlonlineeducation.com/blog-academic-referencing-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care-8.aspx.
³ Raye "Academic Referencing.”
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All styles also require a list of references or bibliography at the end of the text. These vary slightly based on Style Guide, for example, only number the references if you have used a number-only style.
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Bibliography
[1]L. Raye, "Academic Referencing - What is it and Why Should You Care?", ADL, 2016. [Online]. Available: http://adlonlineeducation.com/blog-academic-referencing-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care-8.aspx. [Accessed: 22- Mar- 2016].
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Theory is all well and good, but you also need to practice.
That’s why ADL runs a self-paced, budget course on Academic Writing. Come and join the Academy today!
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