Taking up Margo's point.
As a non-academic who occasionally publishes in academic journals, I have
to use the reference style issued by the journal editors. I copy the
examples they give, so I'm not sure which ones I've used.
If you are wanting to give a broad education in academic writing I'd have
thought that students need to know that there are many ways to include
references, but that you can't mix them up. In publications the point of
referencing is to let the reader know which bits are other people's words
or ideas clearly and consistently, and this is the skill which needs to be
passed on. In essays you are presumably testing that skill by providing a
particular style which you want to see consistently applied.
It may be that adherence to a particular system thoughout a university
career provides a transferable skill, but I would have thought it
preferable to allow students to experiment with other systems or even
devise their own. Presumably someone did just that once upon a time
before Harvard was adopted. There might be a clearer way of communicating
being suppressed out there!
Not all reference systems can cope with the data being referenced anway.
The editors of a journal using MLA, asked me and my co-author in an
historical authorship study to provide our own cross-referncing system to
allow the reader to navigate through our numerous internet and other
original text sources of a small number of authors under review. I should
add that internet referencing with eighteenth century titles and subtitles
meant that the reference section ended up at about a third as long as the
actual paper. And they were all checked, as one would hope.
David
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