That may be fine Burkhard but this part of this thread stemmed from Matt's
contention that students and staff members should be free to choose their
referencing system.

I argued that if a faculty has democratically decided on one referencing
style then who is Matt or you or I to contradict that?

You are possibly raising another issue; but I would ask you the same
question, do you do what you do whilst flying in the face of a democratic
decision to the contrary. If so, you are on a sticky wicket that will feed
the plagiarism, standards, quality ... arguments possibly beyond all
telling, If not, that's fine and I can sympathise with some of your
argument!

Duncan

-----Original Message-----
From: Burkard Schafer [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 21 September 2005 13:22
Subject: Re: referencing systems

 
> I think an interesting point has been raised here. From my 
> experience as an academic librarian the lack of consistent 
> institutional and faculty agreement on referencing systems 
> causes a great deal of confusion and distress to students at 
> times when they just want to hand in an assignment and move 
> on to the next piece of work. Many of the students that my 
> colleagues and I assist are more concerned to get the 
> references correct than they are about the main content of 
> the assignment. They need consistency from all staff.  Herein 
> lies a problem: as a former academic colleague who had taught 
> at Harvard used to remind me, there is no agreed 'Harvard' 
> system. If institutions wish to use the author-date system 
> (or numeric, APA, MLA, Vancouver, etc) they need to be clear 
> about what form it takes and for all staff teaching and 
> supporting a faculty to use the same thing. 

I'm not so  sure. It rather depends  on why you insist on and award marks
for the bibliography in the first place. If it is really only for the
examiners to check the footnotes, then maybe yes (possibly appropriate  in
beginner courses) But if you want students to master the specific skill of
"writing with a good bibliography", giving them simple a set of rules that
they know they can follow blindly would be pedagogically precisely the wrong
thing to do. Especially if the students are postgraduates, there is a
practical side to this too: They should be able eventually  to write for all
journals, regardless of their respective house style. This they  learn best
if they used a range of styles themselves, and most importantly, understand
the underlying principles  of referencing and the different rationales for
adopting one style or the other. 
So I very intentionally don't give them  a prescribed style. Rather, I
explain to them what all reference styles try to achieve, point them to two
or three popular versions, and apart from that only consider whether the
style they have eventually chosen "does the job well".

Burkhard

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