Your reference list is a single alphabetical list of all the sources you have cited.  Everything you have cited should be included in your reference list and everything in your reference list should have been cited at least once in the text.  Here are some tips for making the experience of building a reference list that much easier and less stressful.

Build a skeleton reference list as you go

If you use an online resource of any description, especially a website, be sure to copy the URL before you leave and save it to a working reference list in a Google Doc or somewhere similar together with enough information to identify it.  This will save you a lot of time and frustration later when you come to write up your reference list.

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Back in the day, there were different folks trying to solve the same problem: how to make things you find online easily and reliably retrievable despite the people hosting those things regularly giving web pages and other content descriptive names based on where they were within their websites and then wanting to reorganise said websites and change the links to those pages every once in a while.

Two different solutions were proposed and became popular independently: the digital object identifier scheme and permalinks.

Permalinks

The word permalink is a contraction of “permanent link”.  Permalinks are web addresses that identify a document or webpage that is expected to work for as long as the thing it links to remains available on the web.

Often eresource records will clearly label the permalink for a journal article.  In general, permalinks are short and end with a long number or other code that serves as a unique ID for the webpage or document.  For example, the permalink for this blog post is http://www.liblog.port.ac.uk/blog/2020/05/25409/.

Digital object identifiers (DOIs)

The Digital Object Identifier (doi) scheme invited people publishing documents to the web to obtain a doi code (these typically begin 10.1…).  These could be copied and pasted into the online doi resolver to find the original article.  Later, people started making doi codes into permalinks that could be clicked on to visit the thing they represented.  Any doi code can be made into a working permalink by adding https://doi.org/ to the start of the doi code (with no spaces).

These days, doi codes can be turned into just one type of permalink.

DOIs, permalinks and APA (6th ed.) referencing

For some reason (not a logical one, as far as I can tell), APA 6th ed. insists that we should all give the doi link wherever a doi is available in references (in the reference list).  Otherwise, we are allowed to use another form of permalink.

Hopefully, this clears up some confusion about these relics from the earlier days of the web.  If you have any questions, please chat to us online and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Books and ebook publishers, in particular, seem to enjoy listing long lists of dates on the back of the title page in order to confuse anyone trying to reference the (e)book.  This blog post explains how to pick the right date for referencing (using any referencing system, not just APA).

Dates to use

The date you want is the one marked as “publication date” or “this edition published on” date on the back of the title page.  On some first edition books, the publication date is listed as “first published in year“.

If no publication date is given, use the most recent copyright date listed.

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As we all know, the correct number of authors for any work is one.  This makes it really simple to cite and reference, saving us time and therefore is objectively the best number.  Authors are however gregarious folk who often like to write articles, books and other works collaboratively with no thought for how much this will complicate your attempts at referencing.  For other sources, no author can be identified.  This is where life gets fun.

This post explains what to do when faced with an unhelpful number of authors in APA (6th ed.) referencing.

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Most author names are capitalised.  However, some names begin with lowercase prefixes like de, d’, van or von, and many social media usernames begin with a lowercase letter or are entirely in lowercase. In such cases, include the name in both the citation and the reference list in the same way the author has presented it in their work, unless the name begins a sentence.

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Assuming you have been sensibly listing links for all the articles, ebooks and other online information sources you have used as you went, and have grouped everything as best you can by resource type (books, ebooks, journal articles, etc.), you will be well set up to build your reference list.  Here’s a quick guide to painlessly turning your skeleton reference list into a fully formatted one in three easy steps.

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Following on from my first post introducing citation, I just wanted to cover a couple of variants that commonly cause confusion – sources written by ‘corporate’ authors, sources with no author, and sources with no publication date.

Corporate authors

Companies, government departments and other organisations write reports and publish them with themselves as author.  Treat such ‘corporate authors’ as for individual authors.  For example:

Shell (2005, p. 10) gives the gross profit margin for Q1 2004 as…

or     

Shell’s gross profit margin for Q1 (2004) was … (Shell, 2005, p. 10).

Citations for sources with no publication date

If you have a copyright date for a source but no publication date, use the copyright date instead.

If no date is given, which is common on websites, put n.d. (for “no date”) instead of a date, for example:

“Angel therapies” (n.d.) describes a complementary therapy…

or

Various complementary therapies exist, including angel therapy (“Angel therapies”, n.d.)…

Citations for sources with no author

Use the first (typically up to four) words of the title instead of the author’s name.  If the source is a book or ebook, give the title in italics; for webpages, reports and other materials, use “double quotation marks” instead.

For a website or other source without page numbers

“Life amidst adversity” (2020) debates…

or     

…after lockdown ends (“Life amidst adversity”, 2020).

For books and ebooks

Viral dreams (2020) is a collection of dystopian short stories…

or     

…Lovecraftian horror combined with contemporary events (Viral dreams, 2020)

Give (a) page number(s), if appropriate.  In this example the citation is for the book as a whole and so includes no page number(s).

The last word on citation

If you are ever in doubt about citing something, there is extensive advice under Cite it on the Referencing@Portsmouth website.  You can find Referencing@Portsmouth by clicking on the blue and white [r] button on the Library website.