Template talk:Harvard reference

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[edit] Sooo...

Guys, what is the difference between using this template:

* {{Harvard reference
| Surname1=Di Maio
| First1=M
| Surname2=Pisano
| First2=C
| Surname3=Tambaro
| First3=R, Greggi S, Casella G, Laurelli G, Formato R, Iaffaioli RV, Perrone F & Pignata S
| Year=2006
| Title=The prognostic role of pre-chemotherapy hemoglobin level in patients with ovarian cancer
| Periodical=Front Biosci
| Volume=11:1585-90
| Date=[[May 1]], [[2006]]
}}. PMID 16368539.

which produces the following result:

  • Di Maio, M; C Pisano & R, Greggi S, Casella G, Laurelli G, Formato R, Iaffaioli RV, Perrone F & Pignata S Tambaro (May 1, 2006), "The prognostic role of pre-chemotherapy hemoglobin level in patients with ovarian cancer", Front Biosci 11:1585-90. PMID 16368539.


and this code:

<li>Di Maio, M, Pisano, C & Tambaro, R, Greggi S, Casella G, Laurelli G, Formato R, Iaffaioli RV, Perrone F & Pignata S (2006), "The prognostic role of pre-chemotherapy hemoglobin level in patients with ovarian cancer", <i>Front Biosci</i>, vol. 11:1585-90. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16368539 PubMedID 16368539]</li>.

which results in the same thing (at least on my comp):

  • Di Maio, M, Pisano, C & Tambaro, R, Greggi S, Casella G, Laurelli G, Formato R, Iaffaioli RV, Perrone F & Pignata S (2006), "The prognostic role of pre-chemotherapy hemoglobin level in patients with ovarian cancer", Front Biosci, vol. 11:1585-90. PubMedID 16368539.

besides the fact that the second code doesn't force the servers into a "delivery pizza" situation. Or with other words - what is the benefit of using this sophisticated template? -- Boris 17:01, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

So that style is consistant across all articles which use Harvard referencing. If any style changes are decided in the future, they are easy to implement. --Oldak Quill 23:12, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] URL access date

This template is quite nice, and also beyond my ability to safely and boldly edit. So I write to its maintainers: shold we not have optional fields for URL access date? The Harvard Standard seems to require one when a URL is included in the citation (as this template allows), formatted as d MMMM yyyy in square brackets at the end of the cite, like so: [1 September 2004] (no punctuation). I, for one, would be far more likely to use it if this was included. I note further that, for compatibility with date preferences, we might rather have the day-month and year portions separated and wikified. --Kgf0 22:23, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

That's a good idea. I'll try to add that. I'll also let the date be wikified. COGDEN 23:55, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Space in surname

While editing Maracaibo, I discovered that a citation using a two-word surname (i.e., de Pons) causes the reference and the citation not to link correctly. The in-article reference does the correct thing by converting the space to an underscore (#CITEREFde_Pons1806), but in the reference, the anchor does not contain an underscore (<cite style="font-style:normal" id="CITEREFde Pons1806">). The result is that clicking the in-text reference does not link to the citation. --Animated Cascade talk 10:51, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

This bug seems to either have been fixed or just vanished. I can't reproduce it. --Ligulem 07:58, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Newspaper

What's the correct way to use this template for citing newspaper articles? See, for example, Robert Hayes Gore. I have the date in "Volume", so it gets preceeded by "no.". One of the examples here shows a "Date" field, but that doesn't seem to work. Any ideas? I'm sure I'm just missing the obvious... JRP 12:51, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

I've implemented the Date field. If used, it overrides the Year field for display purposes (althouth Year is still required, for referencing consistency). COGDEN 20:38, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Edited book

Is there any way to indicate that the first two "authors" of an edited book are the editors, as is done in APA style (e.g.: Robertson, Lynn C., Sagiv, Noam, eds., 2005. Synesthesia: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.) Edhubbard 09:06, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Space between initials and comma with authorlink

When I try to use the author link for the first author in a multiauthor paper, there seems to be an extra space between the period and the comma after the author's name. See [1]. This doesn't happen when there are only two authors, nor does it happen for a multiauthor publication that doesn't have an author link. I checked and I couldn't seem to find any extra spaces in the initials or in the author link. Is there something that I am doing wrong? Edhubbard 13:47, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citing and referencing ISO and similar standards; miscellanous issues

In making some recent edits to the article Exposure value, I encountered several issues when attempting to use the Harvard referencing templates.

  1. {{Harv}} and {{Harvnb}} allow a citation such as Adams (1981) or (Adams 1981, p. 39) but there seems to be no graceful way to handle a citation such as Adams (1981, p. 39). 
    {{Harvard reference
|Surname=Adams
|Given=Ansel
|Year=1981
|Title=The Negative
|Place=Boston
|Publisher=New York Graphic Society
|ISBN=0821211315
}}
  2. If both a chapter and a url are provided, the link gets put in the chapter; this doesn't seem right (few publishers sell individual chapters ...). Example:
  3. There seems to be no graceful way to cite an ISO or similar standard (for example, ISO 2720:1974). The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed;) would cite (ISO 1974) or ISO (1974), and list
    • ISO. See International Organization for Standardization
    • International Organization for Standardization. 1974. General Purpose Photographic Exposure Meters (Photoelectric Type)—Guide to Product Specification. International Standard ISO 2720. International Organization for Standardization.
    The Harvard templates would seem to offer only citing (International Organization for Standardization 1974) or International Organization for Standardization (1974), and listing This gets a bit unwieldy if there are many citations. Alternatively, one could cite (ISO 1974) or ISO (1974), and list An issue of appearance (but possibly also of substance) is that standards designations (e.g., ISO 2720:1974) usually are set in upright rather than oblique type in the full references. Embedding a style in the template entry deals with the appearance, but not necessarily in the most elegant manner; an additional "Designation" or similarly titled parameter might be indicated. By itself, of course, this would not address the difficulty in making a citation and having it linked to the full reference.

    I ended up manually embedding links to use the form in which these standards commonly are handled in the photographic literature, citing ISO 2720:1974, and listing

    • ISO 2720:1974. General Purpose Photographic Exposure Meters (Photoelectric Type)—Guide to Product Specification. International Organization for Standardization.
    The ISO standards themselves seem to suggest the last form of citation, and the Wikipedia articles on ISO standards (e.g., ISO 31) seem to use a similar format.

Any suggestions? JeffConrad 00:41, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Item 1 was addressed by the addition of {{Harvtxt}}. JeffConrad 18:56, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some more additions

At least for scientific sources, this appears to me to be the most usable of all references, for

  • editing references (and copying them to other articles) becomes easy because one does not have to dig around in the source; moreover, the commonly-used footnote system is abysmal and (IMHO) should be abolished except for actual annotations because to preview references, the entire article needs to be edited (so that the <references/> tag as well as the referenced text is in the edited code). Try this with a 50k+ article, and weep. For example, Procellariidae is a fine article but I dump references in there as <!-- -->, because by now it is very tough to add refs without breaking something if you have not wirtten the article yourself. One has to read the entire list of references - which are unsorted - to find out if something is actually in there already :(
  • Numbered footnotes suck. Cannot be resorted etc. Should be abolished entirely ASAP.

But there needs to be some additional flexibility, some of which may be hard to accomplish:

  • digital referrers, such as PMID, DOI need to be added to periodical articles. Note that e.g. BioOne uses "forbidden" characters (square brackets) in their DOI, which breaks WP code if used with the DOI template.
  • More than 4 authors
  • It would be nice to be able to annotate in what format an online version of the ref is (i.e. HTML abstract, PDF fulltext etc)
  • Errata should be includable
  • If possibly, small-caps for first author surname (or authors in case there are only two). This is far too hard to code if you do refs by hand, but it could be made into the template. If impossible, bold for first author surname. Publications use small caps to make references lists better to read, but bold just does the trick as well. To make the code recognize it must do this with both authors if there are only two (-> woith those authors that are named in the citation) could be tricky. But not to use something like this makes long reference lists abysmally hard to read.
  • are multiple citations of one reference allowed (as they are in footnore refs)?

In a nutshell, when this template is able to correctly reproduce the references in Mallard, it is what I've always been waiting for. Until then, I'll rather code my refs by hand as no template allows to put all the info in I want to put in and live with the fact that one has to scroll down and up manually to find the ref some annotation pertains to. Dysmorodrepanis 11:14, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] commas/periods

As I understand it, Harvard referencing puts periods after the date, the title, and the publisher. The Harvard referencing template puts commas in those places. Bubba73 (talk), 23:29, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] et al

If I have a reference with many authors, it appears that citations to it must list all authors in order for it to link to the full reference. It would be nice if you could use et al somehow with these. WilliamKF 20:19, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

There's a shortcut. This hasn't been documented, but if you use the "Ref" parameter in both the citation and the reference, the citation will link to the reference. For example, if you wrote {{Harv|Smith et al.|2006|Ref=SmithTag}}, then did {{Harvard reference|Last1=Smith|Last2=Jones|Last3=Brown|Year=2006|Ref=SmithTag}}, they would appear as "(Smith et al. 2006)" and "Smith; Jones & Brown (2006)", respectively, and you'd get linkage. COGDEN 02:15, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Converting from other templates

I'm editing a page, Eicosanoid, which is currently referenced in Harvard reference style, but not using the Harvard templates. I'm considering doing a mass edit in order to get links from the inline cites down to the reference section, using the the Harvard templates. But I'm having some reservations:

  • The Harvard templates don't have DOI fields and many of the cites have it.
  • The Harvard templates have many of the same fields as the cite templates, but the Harvard templates Uppercase all their keywords. Could they be made case-insensitive?

David.Throop 15:09, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea to add a DOI tag to this template, and I'll try to do this. Regarding capitalization, this template was made, originally, to be compatible with Book reference, Journal reference, etc., which are now deprecated in favor of the cite templates, but the previous templates used capitals. I'm considering modifying this template to accept either uppercase or lowercase. That would complicate the template, but I think compatibility is important here. COGDEN 20:06, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Note: I've put together a beta-version template for testing that accepts lowercase parameter names. It is found at template:Harvard reference/testing. COGDEN 23:44, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Revamped template

I've put together a revamped Harvard reference template at template:Harvard reference/testing. It should be compatible with the present template, but it has the following additional features:

  • It accepts lowercase parameters, in addition to uppercase.
  • It accepts DOIs.
  • It accepts multiple editors.
  • It has better handling of book chapters and compilations.

Can someone please help test this? I can't see any problems at this point, but I don't want to change the present template until I know there are no serious problems. COGDEN 03:08, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

I've implemented these changes and updated the template. Because of the complexity and the need for alternative parameter names, I've used the common programming technique of using an interface template in conjunction with a core template. The interface catches all parameter variations and synonyms, making the template more flexible and robust. The core template, Template:Harvard reference/core, has all the internals of the template. Having a two-step structure makes the template much simpler and easier to maintain.
One of the goals here, I think, is backwards compatibility, while allowing for compatibility with the cite templates such as Template:Cite book and Template:Cite journal. You should just be able to change the template name to adopt a different citation style without changing any of the parameters. COGDEN 18:59, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I like the interface-core approach.

Can params be abbreviated? It would be very tedious to code refs, and I like to do the template not split between lines. It would kill editing articles like Ivory-billed Woodpecker, because you'd have through scroll through seas of code

Said article would also be a good test for any ref template (Fitzpatrick et al. 2005, 2006b), or Mallard (for ref diversity). I have done Harvard refs manually, but they'd better be linked in-text because they have grown too much. Procellariidae and Kakapo have gone virtually uneditable for using tag-refs; the continuity of the article's text is destroyed in much of the former (look at the source of this section - GAH!), and a few commonly cited refs make ref editing hell in the latter.

The reference section itself is footnote-cited articles is sheer hell; hard to read without 20/20 vision and the link-blue makes it not easier. Sorting is nonexistent; these are really footnotes, not references; the section on its own might be useful as a bibliography, but not in the present state (i.e. nether sorted by date nor by author). I expect some 10-20 new refs to be added to each of the two articles over the next year or so, which is reason enough why a sleek and flexible ref template should be developed.

I think it would actually be best to leave internal formatting to the user, and just format blocks of text, with the single blocks being fairly exchangeable. So instead of splitting author names and such and reassmebling them, I'd just use a1, a2, a3, ... a(n). Don't know if it's possible, but I think it's highly desirable as referencing is major sore of WP. Date/title should be universal features of any ref and date format can be left to the user, thus uniting the year and date params. Books and papers could possibly united by considering article titles and chapter titles essentially the same thing, as with book titles and journal names; both could be linked to WP articles if such are available. Here, the user would want to get leeway - split it into different params so that the displayed book/journal would not have to read Les Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences or Proceedings_of_the_Royal_Society#Proceedings_of_the_Royal_Society_B but C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris and Proc. R. Soc. B. And so on.

I am a bit wary about automatizing links. Just a gut feeling. I like to describe the links I place (like fulltext, abstract etc - and you get all sorts of these, like imageless HTML on findarticles, or JSTOR refs, or SORA PDF files, etc. I try to link as much of a ref as possible to find on-line). For Online media articles however, I usually link the title. Dunno why, probably it's just a habit from External Links editing. MAYBE the second part of Harvard refs (anchoring in the ref into the output text) could just be adapted for these or vice versa.

At any rate, I find the current Harvard template tries to be too useful, too eager to autoformat at the cost of sleekness and flexibility. Improving it becomes all sorts of dragging along legacy stuff that might be dumped. The most extreme divergence is probably between whole books (incl academic theses), journal articles, and Web articles. I wonder if it were possible to reduce params thus:

a1; a2; a3; a4; ...   (authors - might even be single param. Let users add authorlinks at will; they are not usually necessary. Formatting: small caps.)
year   (see below at "web_version". Formatting: put in brackets, add period or colon)
title   (Formatting: add period)
title_web
IF source is not empty, add In:
*#e1; e2; e3; ...   (editors, or generally authors of containing work of "title". Let users add (eds.) at leisure. Rest as "authors" but add colon)
*#web   (for Web sources such as news outlets, blogs. Might be united with next. Formatting: none)
*source   (Formatting: italics. Formatting in param value must be respected for scientific texts)
*#source_edition (Formatting: precede with "(", add ". ed.)")
*#source_wp   (wikipedia article about source - book, journal etc)
*vol   (Formatting: bold)
*issue   (Formatting: put in brackets, add colon if "pages" not empty; no space between this and source is usual)
*chapter (necessary? Formatting: precede with "Chapter". Add colon if "pages" not empty)
*pages   (Formatting: add period)
*publisher (Formatting: Let user link as desired, add period)
*web_version   (Date of last revision of Web articles)
*web_checked
*doi:; isbn:; pmid:; ...   (Might be that these could be united into a param. Formatting as in existing templates; might be small).

*+ external link(s)   (Need not necessarily be part of template at all, as these are decidedly nonstandard. Formatting: none)
*+ footnotes (it may be possible to annotate references. I.e. P. Zool. Soc. London, C.R. Acad. Sci. Paris old volumes often have conflicting dates of issue and need accompanying ref to source...

(* = optional. # = requires "source" not empty)

The most basic format of a refs would thus be (leaving out the smallcaps which are tricky):

Author, first name (Year): Articletitle.

while the most complex possible would be e.g.

List of 1000s of authors with first names & WP article links n stuff (Year): Articletitle. In: List of editors n stuff (editors): Booktitle (42. ed.) 5 Chapter 3: 1-99. Publisher w/WP links. ISBN.

I think this would handle >98% of all citations fine and allow to add max information, as well as handle and edit LARGE numbers of references if tied in Harvard template-style (i.e., refs collected and sorted all in a separate section, with just the anchor tags in the article proper's source code. The last half year or so my #1 hobby was referenceing WP articles, and the layout I arrived at is based on my personal experiences with handling hundreds of (mainly) scientific refs. My list of commonly used citations grew out of this... it's just stuff I come across so often in castrated format (no year etc) that it is worth the effort to compile... Dysmorodrepanis 01:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Expansion of template - HELP!

Hello, you clever template editors you.

I've recently created something of a fuss on the Atomic line filter page by removing Harvard references which were being used to cite patents and breaking the Harvnb links. (Aside: having done some tests, I've found quite a lot of articles where such links are broken - is there some way to minimise such unintentional damage by unsuspecting editors not aware of the complexities of inline Harvard citations).

My comments in Talk:Atomic line filter#Harvard referencing for patents make clear why I think Harvard referencing is currently not suitable for citing patents, the big one being that the named inventors are not typically the authors of the work. I've come here for help in rectifying this since patents should be a useful source of information that might need referencing and doing so under the Harvard model would be good for consistency.

Is it possible to further expand the current Harvard templates to include an alternative set of citation options for patents? eg fields such as "inv1last" (for inventor1 last name), "inv2first" (for inventor 2 first name), "app-pub" (for application publication date), "pat-pub" (for patent publication date) etc etc. Alternatively, would it be possible/better/easier to extend Template:Cite patent to include some Harvard-like features so that it can be used with the Harv and Harvnb. Sadly, my knowledge of template creation is limited, or I would try to sort this out myself.

I think this could be an important addition to the template namespace! Looking forward to receiving your thoughts. GDallimore 15:52, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

The template could probably be adapted to cite patent publications, but we would need to figure out some standard citation style. Cite patent is pretty basic and doesn't include things like the name of the inventor. To be used in this author-year system, we have to include the "author" (inventor) and the year of publication. Do you have any suggestions on a full citation style? COGDEN 02:30, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi. Thanks for the reply. The basic information to include would be, I think:
  • publication number (application number probably not needed)
  • country (might want to include two letter country code as well as or in place of full country name to aid automatic linking to esp@cenet (as in Cite patent))
  • title
  • inventor name(s)
  • assignee/applicant
  • earliest filing date (known as priority date)
  • publication date of application
  • publication date of patent (if granted)
  • an indication of whether it is a patent or a pending application
I'll bring this discussion to the attention of a couple more patent attornyes to see what they think. GDallimore 04:32, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
I happen to be a patent attorney, as well, so I have an interest in this. I just did a major overhaul of this template that should allow for the incorporation of citations to things like patents that aren't like either a book or a periodical. COGDEN 18:34, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I've made a rough first pass at this for testing purposes. This doesn't yet include things like assignee, etc., but it's a beginning we can work from. One problem I can see is that for linking, we need a "year" parameter, and I'm not sure which year to include. Publication year?:

{{Harvard reference/testing
 | inventor-last=Wada
 | inventor-first=Hiroshi
 | title=Liquid crystal display device with particular angle between optical axis of optically anisotropic material and observation direction
 | country-code=US
 | publication-number=5,212,819
 | description=patent
 | issue-date=[[May 18]] [[1993]]
 | year=1993
 }}.

Result:

Wada, Hiroshi, "Liquid crystal display device with particular angle between optical axis of optically anisotropic material and observation direction", US patent 5,212,819, issued May 18, 1993.

You would link to this by writing {{Harv|Wada|1993}}, giving: (Wada 1993). COGDEN 19:56, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

There's too many of us patent attorneys around! One brief comment, the publication number musn't include commas to work when linking to Espacenet. Something to make sure to include in any documentation.
Otherwise, that's looking interesting. I'm not sure I understand why you need a year parameter. Is that a limitation in the Harv template? I would have thought that the best parameters to use would be the country and the patent number - less likely to turn up more than once in a given article as well as being the most important pieces of information in the reference. In any event, I think a "year" parameter by itself is ambiguous (is that priority date, filing date, publication date of application, publication date of patent?). I think it needs qualifying.
If this is an unavoidable limitation in the Harv template, I assume that once the harvard referencing template is set up, a new citation template (perhaps called Harvpat, or something) could be set up which would just give a display of "US Patent 123456" and an inline link to a fuller breakdown in the references section, or whereever. Correct me if I'm abusing the intended use of Harvard referencing or making things too complicated! GDallimore 11:21, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Having studied templates a bit further, I've now created the sort of template that I think is best for patents Template:Ref patent. Doesn't require a named of a person, so is probably incompatible with Harvard referencing. So sorry to have bothered you with a deadend request, but it anyone wants to try to improve Ref patent, they're welcome to. GDallimore (Talk) 14:01, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] commas between names

If there are more than two authors, the template lists "last1, first1, last2, first2". Shouldn't the first and second author be seperated by a semicolon or something other than a comma? It looks confusing, for example the next to last reference at lunar effect#References. Bubba73 (talk), 16:15, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

You're right. That does look confusing. Some citation styles avoid that problem by using only the initials for given names, but I think Wikipedia citation templates have to be more general than that. I'll try putting in a semicolon and see what happens. COGDEN 18:08, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Often I've seen only the first author listed as "last, first". But I don't know what is standard or most common. Bubba73 (talk), 19:20, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I made the change. Does the semicolon make things look better? COGDEN 18:35, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I think that makes it a lot clearer. Thanks. Bubba73 (talk), 19:57, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Help!

How do you cite multiple works? For example, if you want to write: "Numerous authorities attest to this fact (Jones 1927; Hutton & Smelt 1976; Doolittle 2004)." Is there a way to do this? It seems you need to be able to do this for any moderately technical article. Can it be done? —Dfass 15:51, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

You can use Template:Harvnb. For example, for the above you would write: Numerous authorities attest to this fact ({{Harvnb|1927}}; {{Harvnb|Hutton|Smelt|1976}}; {{Harvnb|Doolittle|2004}}). COGDEN 17:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Awesome! Thanks a ton! —Dfass 04:43, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
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