The 2011 version of John Hynes’ Guide to citing references (Harvard system) is proving to be the most popular of our How to research guides.
The guide provides a brief introduction to referencing: both citing references to others’ work within the text of your assignment/thesis/paper, and compiling an accurate list of references.
The Harvard system (Harvard style) is based on Author – Date information in the text with a list of references at the end in alphabetical order. However, it does allow for some variation in the detailed formatting. For example:
A) Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2010) Cite them right: the essential referencing guide. 8th edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
OR
B) FISHER, D., and HANSTOCK, T., 1998. Citing references: a guide for students. Blackwell.
The guide chooses A because all Manchester Business School course handbooks use uppercase and lowercase for authors’ names, rather than all uppercase (and an unscientific survey of descriptions of Harvard referencing had most with the publication year in brackets).
Reference Management
It is much, much easier to do the references in any assignment/paper/thesis if you keep a record of your related reading as you go along. There are a number of options for reference management:
- Manual (e.g. Word) - Simply create yourself a “my references” document, and as you read a paper/book/… add all the necessary reference information. When writing do your referencing by hand: cutting and pasteing from your references document as appropriate.
- EndNote – A sophisticated reference management system, available on all University of Manchester cluster PCs and supported by Library training sessions. ( JRUL EndNote Page, Endnote FAQs ) However you have to buy a personal copy to use on your own laptop (academic discount available).
- EndNote Web – Free to University of Manchester staff and students with our site licence for EndNote. (JRUL EndNote Web Page, EndNote Web FAQs) Well worth a try before buying your own personal copy of EndNote.
- Zotero – Free reference management software: originally a Mozilla Firefox browser plugin but now also available in a stand-alone version. Well regarded – for example Cambridge Business School library’s recent post Zotero: a new dawn for referencing
- Mendeley – Free reference management software like Zotero – adopts support for collaboration as its unique selling point.
If you have a small number of references it is relatively easy to do your referencing manually. However using reference management software can be a big help in getting your references organised and making it easy to produce a consistent professional set of references like you see in academic texts and journal articles.
When using EndNote and Cite While You Write (CWYW) to manage your references it can be a little tricky to add page numbers into citations in the text.
EndNote CWYW adding page numbers - click to expand
The key is to edit the EndNote citation and include the page number(s), and any punctuation, in the Suffix not Pages field.
The technical reason for this is that Harvard (and its variants) is an author date citation style and so the pages field is ignored. (In contrast MLA is an author page number citation style, but this is rarely used in business and management literature.)
The EndNote CWYW Edit Citation feature is also used if you want your in text citation to have just the year – just tick the Omit Author checkbox.
Related FAQs on EndNote (from http://go.mbs.ac.uk/bizlib247 ):
Finally, advice from the University of Queensland on how to combine references if you have written each chapter as a separate Word document – http://www.library.uq.edu.au/endnote/combine_chapters.html
We have updated some FAQ entries related to literature searching:
A standard literature search involves an actively searching e-journal databases. An alternative approach is to use current awareness services: set up one or more alerts or RSS filters for your topic and get the latest research sent to you.
Whatever the scale of your literature search you need to consider how you are going to manage the references you gather. You can use a reference management software package (e.g. EndNote, EndNote Web, Zotero, …) or keep your own “master file” with the full citation information for all your references.
If you have suggestions for making literature searching more effective and efficient, please leave a comment.
Additional notes:
It has proved surprisingly hard to find journal articles about literature searching for business and management. A couple are included in the answer, “Where can I find information about doing a literature search?“ If you are looking for something short and readable, the article “Conducting a literature review” (Rowley and Slack, 2004) aims to provide pragmatic guidance to students rather than contribute to academic research on literature searching.
Rowley, J. and Slack, F. (2004) Conducting a literature review, Management Research News, 27 (6), 31 – 39. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01409170410784185 [Accessed 09 Nov. 2010].
The Sainsbury Library for Said Business School at Oxford is using delicious.
One set of delicious bookmarks that are relevant to any business school are for referencing : http://delicious.com/SainsburyLibrary/referencing
Since EndNote is the reference management software most recommended at University of Manchester, the EndNote tips link is probably the most relevant. However, the delicious bookmarks will be of interest if you want to investigate alternatives.
EndNote related questions:
Manchester Business Answers 24/7 service EndNote questions
The information on Manchester Business Answers 24/7 ( www.mbs.ac.uk/bizlib247 ) about Harvard citation style was getting rather long, so collected it into a draft document.
Harvard referencing and EndNote (PDF) – Jan 2010 draft
This tries to explain why using Harvard referencing is harder than you might think, particularly when using EndNote.
Have updated several EndNote related questions based on what I learned writing this document (using EndNote of course).
EndNote related questions
Please leave a comment if you find Harvard referencing and EndNote useful.
Mark
This post continues from previous one on updating information about Harvard citation style ( references-harvard-citation-style)
Where can I find info on how to use EndNote? updated.
New links to the various training sessions available.
