‘But I don’t want to use Harvard Referencing!’

Reluctance.
(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

There can be many reasons why you don’t want to use Harvard Referencing.

• You might find it intimidating.
• You might prefer to use footnotes rather than names and dates in brackets.
• Or you might be writing for publication, and someone has told you to use another system.

If You Must

If your tutor has reminded you that you have to use Harvard Referencing, then the best thing to do is to learn the basics and dive right in. Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland has authored some helpful videos which she’ll tell our music students about.

However, don’t forget that the library also has a hard-copy and an e-book of this handy guide:-

Richard Pears & Graham Shields, Cite Them Right: the Essential Referencing Guide (London: Macmillan) [dates vary depending on edition]

Section E, pages 29-119, is all about Harvard Referencing. It’s a huge chunk of the book, but it will help you correctly cite just about anything under the sun!

If You Must Not

If you are writing for a journal or another institution, you may well find their requirements are different.  But this book has chapters on different referencing styles.  Section G, pages 137-156 describes Chicago referencing style.  It’s a shorter chapter!

Did you know there are two different ways of formatting Chicago referencing, one more common in arts and humanities, and the other more common in the social sciences?  The library can’t tell you which to use – you will need to find out what your tutor, journal or publisher has chosen as their preferred style.  (This is known as the ‘House style’ in the world of publishing.)

‘There’s no Time like the Present’ – True Saying

If you use Zotero, you can set up any new document to do referencing in whatever style you like. You can reformat the references to a different style later if necessary. The sooner you start using Zotero, the sooner you start building up an invaluable resource for the future. (The best way to get the most out of Zotero is to check what your Zotero library has saved for any particular reference. If it has saved hyperlinks that you aren’t going to need, or the title looks untidy, it is the work of seconds to tidy it up – at the point where you save the reference in the first place.)