Wikipedia talk:Author-date referencing

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[edit] Disagreement about placing references w.r.t. punctuation

It is mentioned: "Linking to the article using an embedded link, like this. [1] Embedded links, like footnotes, are placed after punctuation." Nobody taught me this, but the following bindings have always been implicit to me:

  • The '[1]' above should immediately follow the period (no leading space) because it binds to the sentence. The space disconnects it visually and syntactically.
  • Embedded links, like footnotes, should be placed after the thing in question. If the reference modifies a sentence, it should follow the sentence' stop, as the stop is syntactically part of the sentence. If the reference modifies just a phrase, it should precede the phrase' stop; that is it should immediately follow the phrase itself, as the stops are parts of sentences and not of constituent phrases which sit amoung that syntax. Placing an embedded link or footnote after a stop is "too late" to modify that phrase as a new phrase has begun (and so, to me, visually and syntactically modifies nothing, or a null thing). Placing it after the full stop modifies the entire sentence, and if the link or footnote isn't for the entire sentence then it is misleading.

Christian Campbell 13:40, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] For LHOON

LHOON, could you say what you mean by: "It also may be considered to put a too strong emphasis on the identity of the author and on the year of publication." Cheers, SlimVirgin (talk) 07:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

My argument is as follows: a Harvard reference like (Smith, 2004) puts the main emphasis on both the name Smith and the year 2004. The name may or may not be relevant, but as a scholarly article should focus on the underlying facts rather than on individual authors, I prefer to put this information in a footnote or reference list rather than into the text body. This is particularly the case with an extended number of references, where all parenthetic referencing tends to clutter the page layout more than when numeric references are used. Furthermore, the explicit mentioning of author names in the article body tends to imply the attribution of a certain authority (which may go all the way to a personality cult) to individuals, which is contrary to the scientific method of free examination (implying the rejection of personal authority) and to the personal humility which characterises the true great mind who realises to be only to be a tiny observer in the great universe. Certainly, anyone's work should be properly referenced and credited, but this is perfectly done by numeric or footnote referencing systems. As for mentioning the year, there is the danger for a judgment too much focusing on recent findings (recentism) with an a priori bias against older sources which may prove their value even in advanced research topics. LHOON 08:44, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd say those are very personal views, LHOON. SlimVirgin (talk) 09:50, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
They are indeed, which does not mean they are not to be discussed about though! ;-) LHOON 10:22, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mixing Harvard and Chicago

There is a debate here over whether it is allowable to mix the Chicago and Harvard styles of referencing (like Saffron or Charles Darwin). The debate also concerns a seemingly unclear part of HARV, viz. the Templates section. Please join the discussion at WIAFA talk. Mikker (...) 02:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bad link

The web page referenced as ""Writing with Sources: A Guide for Harvard Students" by Gordon Harvey, retrieved October 18, 2005" in the references section is not fully functional. From the Internet Archive, it seems that the last fully functional version was http://web.archive.org/web/20060118054510/http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources/. Jorge Peixoto 23:24, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cite.php technology for Harvard referencing?

Is there any fundamental technical or stylistic objection to having a program similar to Cite.php (or an option within Cite.php itself) that would generate Harvard references with an automatically alphabetized reference list (in Harvard style of course) and automatically generated links and backlinks between the references and the reference list? And if not—is it because Wikipedia is moving toward deprecation of Harvard references? (I would hope not!) —Neuromath 02:31, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New "add-on" template for citing page numbers in Harvard style with Cite.php

In the case of a single source being cited many, many times in one article Cite.php only allows for two results: Either a whole boatload of redundant lines under <references />, or one huge citation line that has so many page numbers listed i1t is useless, and might even include almost every page in any entire book. Template:Rp solves this (until Cite.php itself is made smarter, anyway), by enabling easy addition of Harvard-style page-number citations, such that the results look like: Alleged fact.[4]:18-9 The template discourages use where this is not necessary, of course. If a reference is only cited 4 times in an article, {{Rp}} is not called for. NB: The point of this is also that {{Ref harv}} is incredibly tedious and error-prone under these specific circumstances (though otherwise useful in other circumstances). Try using {{Ref harv}} 50 times in the same article to cite different pages in the same source and you'll see what I mean. Even remembering what ID to use is pretty much impossible after a while, and soon becomes an out-of-order mess, because the ID numbers do not auto-reorganize if material is moved around, as it often is. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:31, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

PS: See Talk:Glossary of cue sports terms/Archive 3#The page number problem for the "origin story". — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:43, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
I like the effect of Harvard references but I dislike the complexity of the templates and named references. I have come to use a simple ref tag with the information of a Harvard reference inside the tag, e.g. <ref>For quotation from Doe, see: Foo (1923), p. 18.</ref> Is there a way to use the Harvard citation templates without using named references, which I find hard to maintain? Buddhipriya 01:49, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Swan's changes

Swan, your changes may describe the way you use Harvard referencing, but not the way Wikipedia uses it. Just as an example: "Newspaper articles should be cited by the byline, as in (Traynor 2005)." Where have you ever you seen that done in Wikipedia? It was the same with most of the rest of your edit, so I reverted. SlimVirgin (talk) 15:52, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Why would Wikipedia create a new approach to referencing and then have anyone insist it be called "Harvard referencing"? It is not OKAY in ANY form of referencing to make an author optional. The author is the most critical information for any citation. While of course I do not use "Harvard referencing" since it is used exclusively in UK and OZ, the changes are quite appropriate. And if not used this way on Wikipedia, then people need to do a bit more studying up on what constitutes proper citing and Wikipedia needs to not be setting standards that fly in the face of all standards of documentation of sources. NONE of the documents on using "Harvard referencing" make it optional to use an authors name.Cyg-nifier 18:29, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

We don't cite newspaper articles by the name alone, as in Traynor 2005. We would cite the newspaper and date, and then in the References section give a full citation. It's a moot point anyway, because hardly anyone uses Harvard referencing in Wikipedia now. SlimVirgin (talk) 18:39, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
If one looks up newspaper articles in the main online sources for "Harvard references", one will discover that it is quite clear that if an author is available, the article MUST be cited in text using the author's name and must have an entry in the reference list. Only if there is no author is it acceptable to give simply the paper and date, without an entry in the reference. And if it is a moot point, then why the continuing harassment against cleaning this article up so it is accurate? —Preceding unsigned comment added by SwanSZ (talk • contribs)
How would you know what is accurate on Wikipedia given how little editing you have done? Or have you also used other accounts? SlimVirgin (talk) 22:48, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I believe accurate is referring to correct usage in the wider academic community, not accurate referring to its use within wikipedia. Without looking into which is considered proper, I have to agree with SwanSZ that Harvard referencing should be explained here in a way consistent with its usage beyond wikipedia. If we've been improperly using Harvard referencing, then it is time to change. ∴ here…♠ 02:23, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
Re Here's comment above: Well said. — Lumbercutter 02:36, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
We haven't. Swan, under this and other accounts, thinks the way he understands it is the way it must be used all over the world; and the way we use it on Wikipedia is up to us. SlimVirgin (talk) 03:39, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
/me looked into it... Swan, what I see in the article appears to be used widely. Find something else to improve ;).. thanks. ∴ here…♠ 04:04, 1 May 2007 (UTC)


First of all, Swan is a she and has only one account--other genders and other accounts come from the imagination of SlimVirgin as a part of his/her harassment. Swan also is a professional academic and researcher and hence NOT a casual of documentation styles. Inventing a form of documentation just for Wikipedia works against Wikipedia's credibility -- it simply makes it appear that no one has enough smarts to use proper citation forms. Of course, there are small variants across the different styleguides for author-date/parenthetical referencing (APA, MLA, CBE, Chicago, Harvard Referencing), which would suggest it would be better to select one of the styles that does have a definitive standard (such as Chicago, APA, or MLA), but to invent forms of documentation that are inconsistent with general use feeds the criticism of Wikipedia being less than accurate/reliable/credible (just as it works against the tenets of global use to insist on the naming of a style that is only British, with phrasing to suggest it rather than a larger order term is worldwide--something that is quite clear if one looks at the actual evidence rather than slanting it to support an illegitimate argument). Re: the corrections -- there is not a single standard style guide for Harvard referencing on the web that indicates that it is okay to skip the use of an author's name in ANY citation, newspaper article or otherwise, nor are there any for the larger use of author-date/parenthetical referencing, such as APA, MLA, or CBE. Author information is the most important information in a citation and certainly in no credible style guide is it optional for any type of source. The additions of information I made to refer to standard works, such as Shakespeare's plays or Dante or the Bible or the Qu'ran, are standard additions from MLA/Chicago for the use of author-date/parenthetical referencing in a humanities context. Cyg-nifier 17:09, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

For some time, I've watched this debate from the sidelines, but the revert of SwanSZ's latest edit seems mighty heavy handed, and I don't think the article is the better for it. Although I concede the lack of a smoking gun to support the contention that "Harvard referencing" is the British name for the author-date citation system, the claim "no it isn't" has no supporting reference, either. Circumstantial evidence, most of which has been covered in previous discussion, strongly suggests that it is a British term:

  1. Nearly all hits (at least among the first 400) on a Google search for "harvard referencing" are sites in the UK or Australia. I don't see how such a result can be interpreted as other than "it's a "British term".
  2. "Harvard Referencing" is not mentioned in The Chicago Manual of Style, the first of the "authoritative style guides" in WP:MOS. I don't suggest that CMS is infallible, but it is comprehensive, and the absence of "Harvard Referencing" suggests that the term is not commonly used in the United States. I don't have the APA or MLA style guides; perhaps someone else can comment on whether the term appears in either.
  3. I question an article in the British Medical Journal as the authoritative source for a system of documentation. Even if it were, Chernin's comments would seem to support SwanSZ's argument:
The origin of the phrase "Harvard system" remains unexplained. According to an editorial note in the British Medical Journal in 1945, the expression was "not introduced by Harvard University. It is believed that an English visitor to the library of Harvard University was impressed by the system of bibliographical reference in use there, and dubbed it the 'Harvard system' on return to England." Note that this unconfirmed and unattributed anecdote refers to library practice (presumably in the Museum of Comparative Zoology) rather than to Mark's system, which was by then widely used in biomedical publications.
This, again, seems to say, "it's a British term".

The "official" basis for "Harvard referencing" in WP is far from clear. Is it the 11-page document from the Curtin University Library? If so, it would seem an odd choice over the 162 pages on documentation in the 15th edition of CMS, especially in light of CMS's prominent mention in WP:MOS.

It does seem a bit as if Wikipedia has created a new form of source citation and called it "Havard referencing". Although there is no reason this cannot be done, what would be the purpose? Developing a comprehensive style guide (or even a portion thereof, such as on citation of sources) is an enormous undertaking. I was a significant contributors to two such efforts, and was astonished at the effort required, even with substantial borrowing from other sources. Unless a specialized guide can provide significant improvement over others extant, the effort would seem better invested elsewhere.

Although I agree with the comments of several others that "author-date system" may not the most elegant description, it does have some advantages: it's mentioned in almost all of the common systems (e.g., APA, CMS, MLA) as well as the Curtin paper, and unlike "parenthetical", it's quite descriptive of what actually is done. It's also the term used in CMS, and at least for me, that's a solid recommendation.

In any event, the article was better with most of SwanSZ's latest changes. JeffConrad 21:32, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Italicizing "et al" because "foreign": This is perfectly OK, but sometimes considered hypercorrective

The article currently says, "Et al. (an abbreviation of et alii which means "and others.") should be italicised as it is Latin; foreign languages are usually italicised in writing [5]"

It's true that italicization of et al is often enough house style or project style in publishing, although sometimes (especially in the medical profession) it is often forgone as being unnecessary and somewhat hypercorrective. The term is so well known and so frequently repeated that it is considered as naturalized into English and no longer "foreign". A similar process happens with many foreign borrowings if they become naturalized enough to be considered no longer "foreign". For example, it's a bit silly to italicize the words cliché or dénouement in English, because they have been naturalized. However, I am not going to try to change the current Wikipedia SOP, because (a) italicization of et al is indeed often enough house style or project style in publishing, and (b) it's silly to proselytize against it. I just wanted to point out here on the talk page, for the record, that it is sometimes considered unnecessary and hypercorrective. — Lumbercutter 18:13, 15 September 2007 (UTC)