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TMA 01 submitted, referencing is stupid

Sunday, 1 Nov 2015, 12:32

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So finally, i have finished TMA 01!! what a flaming pain in the backside!!

I added my citations and references before I spellchecked and grammarised the essay and submitted.

Referencing is the biggest faff on I have ever come accross... surely someone could have thought of a much easier way than what we use!

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Sunday, 1 Nov 2015, 12:59

by Simon Reed

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The CiteMe web site (one of the many online resources that assist with referencing) has about 1,041 different referencing systems available.

That does suggest a certain amount of "Let's show how special we are by pretending we need our own way of listing title, author, date and page number".

For example:

Harvard - Anglia Ruskin University
Harvard - Bath University
Harvard - Bournemouth University
Harvard - Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Harvard - Cardiff University
Harvard - City University London
Harvard - Coventry University
Harvard - Cranfield University
Harvard - Durham University Business School
Harvard - European Archaeology
Harvard - Imperial College London
Harvard - King's College London
Harvard - Leeds Metropolitan University
Harvard - London South Bank University
Harvard - Manchester Business School
Harvard - Manchester Metropolitan University
Harvard - Newcastle University
Harvard - North-West University
Harvard - Oxford Brookes University
Harvard - Oxford Brookes University - Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
Harvard - Staffordshire University
Harvard - Swinburne University of Technology
Harvard - The Open University
Harvard - The University of Melbourne
Harvard - The University of Northampton
Harvard - The University of Sheffield - School of East Asian Studies
Harvard - The University of Sheffield - Town and Regional Planning
Harvard - University of Abertay Dundee
Harvard - University of Birmingham
Harvard - University of Cape Town
Harvard - University of Gloucestershire
Harvard - University of Greenwich
Harvard - University of Hull
Harvard - University of Kent
Harvard - University of Leeds
Harvard - University of Limerick
Harvard - University of Sunderland
Harvard - University of Technology, Sydney
Harvard - University of the West of England (Bristol)
Harvard - University of West London
Harvard - University of Wolverhampton
Harvard - York St John University
Harvard - York University

I can understand faculties sometimes needing to use specialist ones, but why a specialist one for a faculty in a university, rather than the one in use by the specialist field? Not that the specialist fields seem to be able to make up their own mind:

Biological Psychiatry
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and Neurology
Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing
Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience
Psychiatric Services
Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
Psychiatry Research
The American Journal of Psychiatry
The British Journal of Psychiatry
The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry

And journals wanting their own - what's that about? A quarter of those referencing systems are journal-specific (241 of them). How many permutations or variations of volume / issue / year can there be?

It all just seems to be an exercise in making things difficult.

Now, what happens when your OU tutor is marking your references to OU Harvard or OU Harvard Some Faculty referencing system, but they work for a different university in their day job that uses a different referencing system, and the book they are writing uses another referencing system because the publisher wants it, yet the papers they write for publicatin use a fourth journal-specific referencing system. How confident can we be they are marking our referencing correctly?