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This is a good guide to get you started:

About Citation Styles

There are thousands of citation styles in use. Your lecturer, course director or supervisor may tell you to use a particular one, or allow you to choose one on your own.

Guides for each style will tell you how to format the references:

  • Details on which order to present the bibliographic information.
  • Grammar instructions such as how to use punctuation and capitalisation - what is emboldened, underlined, italicised… where the full stops and commas go…
  • Different rules will apply to different formats of sources (journal articles, book with one author, books with several authors, edited books, chapters in edited books, webpages, reports, films, etc. etc…)

Many different styles are in use in Trinity College Dublin - for definitive answers you should use the full style manual for each system.

Example

We are going to see what a reference looks like using different citation styles. Here's the information we want to reference:

  • Reference Type: Journal Article
  • Author: Shankaranarayanan, G. and Blake, R. 
  • Year: 2017 (February)
  • Title: From Content to Context: The Evolution and Growth of Data Quality Research

  • Journal: ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality

  • Volume: 8

  • Issue: 2

  • Pages: 1-28

  • DOI: 10.1145/2996198

W​e will demonstrate how this appears in two different referencing systems, namely Harvard (an inline style) and IEEE (a numbered style).

About Inline Styles

Inline citations use a brief summary of the reference in the text (such as listing the author and date, or the author and title, or author and page) with the full reference stated at the end of the chapter or work.

This final list is called a reference list or bibliography.

Generally the full list of references will be in alphabetical order by the first author’s surname.

Inline styles are sometimes called the “Harvard” style as they were first used at Harvard in the 1880s. They are also called “Parenthetical” styles as they enclose the partial information in brackets.

It is important to note that there are many variations of the Harvard style, so always check if there is a specific one that is required.

The Library has books on these (and other) styles available to guide students on how to reference correctly.

Harvard

Here's our example in the Harvard style.  It is important to note that there are many variations of the Harvard style, so always check if there is a specific one that is required.

In the text:

This research shows that... (Shankaranarayanan and Blake, 2017).

Reference list:

Shankaranarayanan, G. and Blake, R. (2017) ‘From Content to Context: The Evolution and Growth of Data Quality Research’, ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality, 8(2), pp. 1-28. doi: 10.1145/2996198

About Numbered Styles

Numbered styles list references in the order they are mentioned, using a digit in the text to refer to the fuller citation at the end.

IEEE

Here's our example in the IEEE style.

In the text:

This research shows that... [1].

References:

[1] G. Shankaranarayanan and R. Blake, “From Content to Context: The Evolution and Growth of Data Quality Research,” ACM J. Data Inf. Qual., vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 1-28, Feb. 2017, doi:10.1145/2996198.