Harvard system of referencing

The name Harvard is often given to a system of academic referencing. This is common in Britain, less so in the U.S.A. The system appears to have been used first in a paper (1881) by E. L. Mark, Hersey professor of anatomy and director of Harvard's zoological laboratory (see [[1]], cited wikipedia.

Another name for the 'Harvard System' is the author-date system. The name author-date is preferable for two reasons.

• First, author-date identifies the main element of the system concisely. It consists of naming a source by using only one word and one number, in a way that allows the reader to find it more precisely, usually in the bibliography of the academic text. (One of the advantages of the system is that it also allows the reader to ignore the detail of the source and continue to read the text with the minimum of distraction.)
• Second, the University of Harvard does not normally use the system. A Head of Department there said "It looks to me like what we call the Social Science system."

The name 'Harvard system' may owe something to academic snobbery: Harvard is one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and by using its name, scholars and students may be seeking to bask in its reflected glory. More to the point, the system seems to have been developed from something in Harvard University. It was originally the cataloguing system used in a library in Harvard's Department of Zoology.

One reason for AWE preferring not to use the term 'Harvard System' is that it is applied with widely differing details in different institutions, and indeed with different rules within different departments of the same institution. These are often insisted upon with a rigour that appears unreasonable. Students who transfer from one department to another can be confused by, and indeed penalized for, these changes.