It can take a while to get your head round the quirks of academic writing. Particularly when you’re trying to take notes and put together a structured argument in your essay or thesis. Struggling to get the referencing right can seem like the last straw. When you’re faced with institutional guidelines to referencing, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees.
It’s not often made explicit, but there is one basic premise behind in-text referencing for Harvard. This goes a long way to clarifying how you should present your sources. Essentially, the in-text reference is a pointer – a quick link to the full source detailed in the reference list at the end. Whatever you put in your in-text reference – usually author’s surname, but sometime organisation name for an online source – should correspond exactly to the opening term in the final reference list, which determines where the reference is positioned alphabetically.
So, if J.A.M. Sandwich wrote a treatise on sliced bread in 1963, then your in-text reference should read: (Sandwich, 1963). The final reference should be listed under ‘S’ and begin with the surname rather than the initials: Sandwich, J.A.M. (1963) Sliced Bread: The Best Thing to Come out of the First Half of the Twentieth Century, Oxford: OUP. Alternatively, if the Bread Bakers’ Guild published the piece and didn’t give the name of the author, the in-text reference would read: (Bread Bakers’ Guild, 1963) and the full source would appear under ‘B’ in the reference list as: Bread Bakers’ Guild (1963) Sliced Bread…
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