Parenthetical referencing

• Author–date: primarily used in the natural sciences and social sciences, and recommended by the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association ;
• Author–title or author–page: primarily used in the arts and the humanities, and recommended by the Modern Language Association.

  Origins and use

Author–date

How to cite

• The page number or page range may be omitted if the entire work is cited, as in "".
• Narrative style citations have the author appearing as part of the regular text sentence, outside parentheses, as in: "Jones revolutionized the field of trauma surgery."
• Two authors are cited using "and" or "&": or. More than two authors are cited using "et al.":.
• In some documentation systems, an unknown date is cited as having "no date of publication" by the abbreviation for "no date".
• In such documentation systems, works without pagination are referred to in the References list as "not paginated" with the abbreviation for that phrase.
• "No place of publication" and/or "no publisher" are both designated the same way and placed in the appropriate spot in the bibliographical citation.
• A reference to a republished work is cited with the original publication date either in square brackets or separated with a slash. The inclusion of the original publication year qualifies the suggestion otherwise that the publication originally occurred in 1967.
• If an author published several books in 2005, the year of the first publication is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b and so on.
• A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself. When citing quotes its advisable to insert the page number as this points directly to the page the content that has been used.
• Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as "Works cited" or "References." The difference between a "works cited" or "references" list and a bibliography is that a bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.
• All citations are in the same font as the main text.
• Note that there is no official guide to Harvard citation style, consequently variations occur across various online Harvard citation and referencing guides. For example, some universities instruct students to type a book's publication date without parentheses in the reference list.

  Examples

• Heilman, J. M. and West, A. G.. "Wikipedia and Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, and the Significance of Natural Language." Journal of Medical Internet Research, 17, p.e62. doi:10.2196/jmir.4069.

• Author first listed author's name inverted in the bibliography entry
• Year
• Article title
• Journal title in italic type
• Volume
• Issue
• Page numbers specific page number in a note; page range in a bibliography entry
• Digital object identifier

• Smith, J.. Dutch Citing Practices. The Hague: Holland Research Foundation.
• Smith, J.. Harvard Referencing. London: Jolly Good Publishing.

• Bowcott, Owen. , The Guardian.

  Advantages

• The principal advantage of the author–date method is that a reader familiar with a field is likely to recognize a citation without having to check in the references section. This is most useful in fields whose works are commonly known by their date of publication, or if the author cited is notorious.
• The use of author–date systems helps the reader easily identify sources that may be outdated.
• If the same source is cited more than once, even a reader unfamiliar with the author may remember the name. It quickly becomes obvious if the publication is relying heavily on a single author or single publication. When many different pages of the same work are cited, the reader does not need to flip back and forth to footnotes or endnotes full of "ibid." citations to discover this fact.
• With the author–date method, there is no renumbering hassle when the order of in-text citations is changed, which can be a scourge of the numbered endnotes system if house style or project style insists that citations never appear out of numerical order.
• Parenthetical referencing works well in combination with substantive notes. When the note system is used for source citations, two different systems of note marking and placement are needed—in Chicago Style, for instance, "the citation notes should be numbered and appear as endnotes. The substantive notes, indicated by asterisks and other symbols, appear as footnotes". This approach can be cumbersome in any circumstances. When it is not possible to use footnotes altogether probably because of the publisher's policy, it results in two parallel series of endnotes, which can be confusing to readers. Using parenthetical referencing for sources avoids such a problem.
• The reader can find the in-text author–date citations of a specific work more easily. Finding in-text numbered citations is more difficult because some will not appear if they are included in ranges.

  Disadvantages

• The principal disadvantage of parenthetical references is they take up space in the main body of the text and are distracting to a reader, especially when many works are cited in a single place. Numbered footnotes or endnotes, by contrast, can be combined into a range, e.g. "". However this disadvantage is offset by the fact that parenthetical referencing may be economical for the overall document since, for instance, "" takes up a small amount of space in a paragraph, whereas the same information would require a whole line in a footnote or endnote.
• In many disciplines in the arts and humanities, date of publication is often not the most important piece of information about a particular work. Thus, in author–date references such as "", the date is essentially redundant or meaningless when read on the page, since works may go through numerous editions or translations long after the original publication. Compare a reference in a science discipline such as "The last survey indicated that four hundred were left in the wild ", where the date is meaningful. The reader of certain forms of arts and humanities scholarship may thus be better aided by the use of author–title referencing styles such as MLA: for example, "", where meaningful information is given on the page. Historical scholarship is an exception, since, when citing a primary source, date of publication is meaningful, though in most branches of history footnotes are preferred on other grounds. Generally speaking, however, it is instructive that author–date systems such as Harvard were devised by scientists, whereas author–title systems such as MLA were devised by humanities scholars.
• Similarly, because works are frequently reprinted in many arts and humanities disciplines, different author–date references might refer to the same work. For example, "", "", and "" might all refer to the same essay — and might be better rendered in author–title style as "". Such ambiguities may be resolved by adding an original date of publication, for example, "", though this is cumbersome and exacerbates the principal disadvantage of parenthetical referencing, namely its distraction for the reader and unattractiveness on the page.
• Rules can be complicated or unclear for non-academic references, particularly those where the personal author is unknown, such as government-issued documents and standards.
• When removing a portion of text which has citations in it, the editor must also check the Reference sections to see if the sources cited in the removed text is used elsewhere in the paper or book, and if not, to delete any reference not actually cited in the text.
• The use of the author–date methods can be confusing when used in monographs about particularly prolific authors. In-text citation and back-of-the-book listings of works arranged by date of publication are conducive to errors and confusion: for example, Harvey 1996a, Harvey 1996b, Harvey 1996c, Harvey 1996d, Harvey 1995a, Harvey 1995b, Harvey 1986a, Harvey 1986b, and so on.
• The mixing of text with frequent parentheses and long strings of numbers is typographically inelegant.
• Most historical journals use footnotes because of the need for maximum flexibility. Primary source references to archives, etc., involve long and complex information, all of which may be immediately relevant to a serious reader. An interesting example of this arose with the famous work of the anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution which treated historical events from anthropological perspective: although parenthetical references were used for scholarly sources, the authors found it necessary to use notes for the historical archive material they were also using.

  Author–title

Content notes

Citations