Referencing is one of the most important phases included in any essay writing task. It poses a lot of advantages for students and universities, especially if students are pursuing a higher level of education. The UK education system prioritizes on giving specializations on various subject fields, which is the reason that most of their essays are more focused, detailed and fact-based.
Referencing, especially in the UK system, is a foolproof indicator that the student has gone through research before initiating on the actual essay writing task. To have a widely-referenced work meant that the essay’s main statement is accurate and valid. This also demonstrates how students have understood the topic well enough that they know where the well-rounded sources are. Referencing also protects the students’ essays from plagiarism. The readers will also know where to look for the sources the essay was included in case they want to pursue the topic in another study.
The Harvard referencing system is one of the mostly used referencing formats for academic essays apart from the Oxford, MLA, APA, BMJ and Vancouver styles. Also known as the author-date format, Harvard referencing includes an in-text citation and a bibliographic entry, which gives more details to all citations.
In writing in-text citations, the author’s name and year of publication—enclosed in brackets—are written after the sentence that was cited. If the author’s name is already stated in the sentence, only the year of publication is written as the reference after the sentence. If a table or other visual data is reproduced in its entirety in the essay, a citation must be written as a footnote to the table, which includes the source of the table and year of publication.
For bibliographic entries written at the end of the essay, the following information must be available:
- Author’s name
- Year of publication
- Title of book/journal/dissertation
- Title of article/entry where the cited passage is located
- Publisher
- Publishing location
