Format for References

There are a few reasons for including references when writing:

1. To provide due credit:  Clearly show your reader which parts of the document refer to your work (i.e., what are the results of the research or study that you conducted) and which are references to the work of others (e.g., if you are quoting someone or using a statistic from a study that another person conducted).  If you don’t clearly make the distinction between your work and the work of another person (this may be viewed plagiarism and interpreted as academic misconduct) then the reader may mistakenly get the impression that you came up with everything in your paper (highly misleading).
2. To allow the reader of your paper to find and read the papers that you are referring to.  Sometimes the reader may not be familiar with the concepts that you are referring to and needs to additional background work or the person wants to verify one of your facts.  In these cases it is important that you use a commonly accepted format and that you are consistent (e.g., reversing the volume and issue number of a journal paper makes it harder to find the original paper).

1)   Journal papers:

Format:

<Author 1 name, Author 2 name…and Final author’s name> (Year of publication) <Title of Journal Paper>.  <Name of Journal>, Vol. <Volume number> No. <Issue Number>: <Pages>

Example:

Allan, G.W. (1997) What is Configuration Management? Logistics Spectrum, Vol. 31 No. 1: pp. 15-18.

2)   Conference papers:

Format:

<Author 1 name, Author 2 name…and Final author’s name> (Year of publication) <Title of conference paper>.  <Name of Conference>, <Abbreviation for conference > ‘<Year> (<City in US, state in in US> or <City in non-US> <Country>) <Page listing if available>

Example:

Furnas, G.W. (1986) Generalized fisheye views. Proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '86 (New York, N.Y.) pp. 18-23.

Magnusson, B. and Asklund, U. (1996) Fine Grained Version Control of Configurations in COOP / Orm. Proceedings of Symposium on Configuration Management, SCM6 (Berlin, Germany).

3)   Books

Format:

<Author 1 name, Author 2 name…and Final author’s name> (Year of publication) <Name of book>. <Name of publisher>

Example:

Kahneman, D. (1973) Attention and Effort. Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.).

4)   Web addresses:

Format:

<Name – could be a company, author – something that describes the site> (Date - when you accessed it). <Web address>

Example:

King Features Syndicate Inc. (Jan 21 2001) Slylockfox.  http://www.slylockfox.com.

Finally there are two ways of actually citing references in your report:

1.      By using a numerical index

      In the body of the report: here's an example when I refer to a specific work published by the researcher Carl Gutwin:

      "Second, we summarize Gutwin's earlier framework for workspace awareness for real time interactions [4]

      At the end of the report: in the list of references or the bibliography we would provide all the information about the specific publication that we're referring to:

      [4] Gutwin, C. Workspace Awareness in Real-Time Groupware Environments. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary (1997).

      Here is an example paper that I published which uses this format (includes the conference paper and the list of references).

2.      By using the names of the authors that you are citing and the year.

      In the body of the report: here's an example when I paraphrase a statement published by the researcher Tichy:

      "When someone wants to examine the changes made over time, they simply restore different backup files (Tichy 1991)".

       Here's an example book chapter that I wrote which uses this format.

       At the end of the report: in the list of references or the bibliography we would provide all the information about the specific publication that we're referring to   

             Tichy, W. F. (1991) RCS – A System for Version Control. Software – Practice and Experience, Vol. 15, No. 7: pp 637 – 654.

        Here's the list of references that I used for the above series of chapters.

Although my personal preference is for the second approach (because it allows you to immediately see who is being cited) either approach is acceptable.  Just make sure that you pick one approach and stick to it consistently.