Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing

[[:|WP:HARV]]

Harvard referencing, also known as the author-date system, or parenthetical system, is a citation system developed by Harvard University^[1] and used by many publishers internationally.^[2]^[3] It is one of three citation styles recommended for Wikipedia. The other two are embedded links and footnotes. See Wikipedia:Citing sources for more details.

Origins

The origin of author-date citations is attributed to a paper by Edward Laurens Mark, Hersey professor of anatomy and director of the zoological laboratory at Harvard University, who may have copied it from the cataloguing system used by Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology library.^[1] In 1881, Mark wrote a paper on the embryogenesis of the garden slug,^[4] in which he included an author-date citation in parentheses on page 194, the first known instance of such a reference.^[1] It was later called "Harvard referencing" by British scholars after they learned of the system in a visit to Harvard University (although it has never been called "Harvard referencing" at Harvard or in the United States).

Citation format

Under the Harvard referencing system, a book is cited in the text in parentheses, after the section, sentence, or paragraph for which the book was used as a source, using the surname of the author and the year of publication only, with the parentheses closing before the period, as in (Author 2005). A complete citation is then placed at the end of the text in an alphabetized list of "References".

For two authors, use (Smith & Jones 2005).
For more authors, use (Smith et al. 2005).
If the same author has published two books in 2005, and both are being referenced in the text, this is written as (Author 2005a) and (Author 2005b).
The specific page, section, or division of the cited work can follow the date in this way: (Author 2006:28).
If the date of publication is unavailable, use "n.d." (meaning, no date)
Newspaper articles must be cited by the byline, as in (Traynor 2005), if this information is available.
If a by-line is not available, newspaper articles may be cited using the name of the newspaper and the date of publication after the sentence (The Guardian, December 17, 2005).
Linking to the article using an embedded link, like this. [1] Embedded links, like footnotes, are placed after punctuation.
A book published long after the original publication may be cited (Marx 1867/1967).
For a quotation that is within the text and marked by quotation marks, the citation follows the end-quotation mark ("), and is placed before the period (.), "like this" (Smith 2005).
For a quotation that is indented, the citation is placed after the period, like the following. (Smith 2005)
When the author of the reference is named as part of the text itself, put the year in parentheses; for example "Smith (2005) says..."

Page numbers

When citing books and articles, provide page numbers where appropriate. Page numbers must be included in a citation that accompanies a specific quotation from or a paraphrase or reference to a specific passage of a book or article.

According to Jessica Benjamin, one weakness of radical politics has been "to idealize the oppressed" (1988:9).
Jessica Benjamin has argued that radical politics has been weakened (1988:9).

Page numbers are especially important in case of lengthy unindexed books. As different editions of a book may be paginated in different ways, it is useful to include, either with the citation, or in the reference section, the edition of the book which is being cited. In books, articles, and web pages, if there are chapters or section headings, these may be included in the citation, if it makes it easier for readers to find the cited information. For works which have standardized divisions, such as Shakespeare's plays (act,scene,line) or Aristotle's writings (Book/chapter/line), it may be useful to the reader to include this information in text as it allows a reader to access the passage in any edition.

Page numbers are not required when a citation accompanies a general description of a book or article, or when a book or article, as a whole, is being used to exemplify a particular point of view.

In the 1980s several feminists explored feminist readings of psychoanalytical thought (e.g. Gallop 1985, Hamilton 1982, Rose 1986, Benjamin 1988).
Jessica Benjamin argues that the relationship between males and females is paradigmatic of domination and submission (Benjamin 1988).

References section

Complete citations must be provided, in alphabetical order, in a References section following the text.

For a book: in the case of (Author 2005a) and (Author 2005b), this might be:

Author, A. (2005a). Harvard Referencing, New York: Random House. ISBN 1-899235-74-4
Author, A. (2005b). More Harvard Referencing, New York: Random House. ISBN 1-899235-74-4

For an article: in the case of (Traynor 2005) or (The Guardian, December 17, 2005), this might be:

Traynor, I. "Judge tells Ankara to decide on fate of leading author", The Guardian, December 17, 2005.

Whether or not to use only the initial, as in Traynor, I. or the full name., as in Traynor, Ian, is a matter of personal preference.

A book published long after the original publication:

Marx, Karl. [1867] (1967). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I. Edited by Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers. ISBN 1-899235-74-4

As with all citation advice in Wikipedia, the most important thing is to provide some information about where you found your material, even if you don't know how to format the citation.

Pros & cons

Pros

The principal advantage of Harvard referencing is that a reader familiar with a field is likely to recognize a citation without having to check in the references section.
Another advantage is that if the same reference is cited more than once, even the casual reader not familiar with the author may remember the name. And when many in-text citations for different pages of the same work are used, Harvard referencing can be simpler for the reader than flipping back and forth to footnotes or endnotes full of "ibid" citations.
With Harvard referencing, 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 first citations never appear out of numerical order. (Software often can automate this aspect of the numbered system [e.g., Microsoft Word's endnote system, or Thomson's EndNote, ProCite, and Reference Manager]; but many users either don't have the right software [e.g., only professionals or institutions tend to own licenses for the Thomson apps], or have it but don't know how to use it [e.g., Microsoft Word's endnote system].) Harvard referencing makes the renumbering problem moot.

Cons

The principal disadvantage of Harvard referencing is that it requires more space (which is why the journal Nature, for example, doesn't use it).
Another disadvantage is that the 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.
Perhaps the weakest objection is that the system may be unfamiliar and distracting to a general readership, who are unfamiliar with journal articles. However, it is easy enough to ignore the parenthetical citations if you don't know what they are, or know but don't care.

Templates

Several templates have been developed for Harvard referencing. A summary of the syntax of all Harvard citation templates is included in Wikipedia:Citation templates, and examples of use are at Wikipedia:Harvard citation template examples. Alternatively, the Footnote3 family of templates includes templates designed for Harvard referencing: {{ref harv}}, {{note label}} and {{ref harvard}}.

There is no requirement or recommendation to use citation or footnote templates in Wikipedia, and many editors find them unhelpful and distracting.

Notes

^ ^a ^b ^c Chernin, Eli. "The 'Harvard system': a mystery dispelled" Template:PDFlink, British Medical Journal, v. 297, 1062-1063, October 22, 1988.
^ "Bibliographic Format for References" University of Georgia; advice is based on the Chicago Manual of Style.
^ "Harvard referencing 2007" Template:PDFlink, Curtin University of Technology.
^ Mark, Edward Laurens. 1881. Maturation, fecundation, and segmentation of Limax campestris. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology vol. 6, part 2, no. 12: 173–625. as cited in Chernin.