Author-date List of References

There are two elements in the author-date system of academic referencing (sometimes called the Harvard system of referencing). The first is a 'tag' placed, as unobtrusively as possible in a text. (For details of how to do this, see Author-date in your text.) This refers to a List of References at the end of the text (the article in a journal, or, in a book, at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book - for students, at the end of the assignment). This List of References contains all the Bibliographic detail needed for the reader to be able to find and check any piece of evidence, a piece of data, a quotation or so on. Different departments in different Universities, and different publishers, have many individual preferences over how to present these details. What follows is general advice: check the requirements, or preferences, of the readers for whom you are writing.

A List of References in the author-date system is arranged in alphabetical order of the surname of the author. (Some departments ask students to group different types of sources - books, journals, and electronic resources - in separate sub-lists; others require that there be a single unified list.) The order of the elements of an item in the list is

• surname of the author (this is the same word as in the text tag of the author-date system)
• forename(s) of the author (some departments require initials; others the forename(s) as given on the title page of the book)
• date of the source (this is the other element of the tag in the text, the 'YYYY' year of publication)
  • You should include the edition number of any book, other than the first edition. Some Departments require you to place this after the title, others before the date and inside the (date brackets), and yet others in different paces.
• title of the source, including subtitle, if any. (This is marked in some way, either italic or underlined for a book, or the title of a Journal; and 'single inverted commas' for the title of an article in a Journal or a chapter in an edited book, or a collection of articles by many different authors. Any subtitle is placed after a colon; and, where a title is in Title Case, a subtitle should be in Lower case
• the origin of a source - for a book, the place where it was published and the name of the publisher; for an article, the name of the journal in which it was published; for an on-line resource, the URL and the date on which you accessed the information; and, in general, the information necessary for a reader to be able to find a copy of the source.

Students who find difficulties with a List of References may find some help in Author-date List of References problems.