Years – years! – ago, I posted a complaint about the laborious process of switching all of my MLA-style-except-with-footnotes citations to Chicago-style citations to submit an article to an edited volume. This winter, since the volume was finally accepted by a publisher, we were required to switch all of our citations to Harvard referencing. I had never heard of it. Neither, as it happened, had the volume editors. Nor had anyone in Marketing or Acquisitions at the press where I work. (I didn’t ask Production, but they probably would have known; it was another production editor friend who linked me to a Harvard referencing style guide.)
It took me longer than I thought it should to make the switch, mostly because it involved looking up information that is considered important in Harvard referencing but that I’d left out of my Chicago-style edition: mostly original publication dates and edition numbers, but also the original language of translated texts. (That is a good point! Why don’t MLA and Chicago care about whether the translated transcript of a 1909 meeting was originally recorded in French or German? I had a heck of a time finding out the answer to that one.) Where MLA citation requires the most salient information for literary scholars – author (last name), page number – to be included parenthetically after quotes, Harvard referencing must be a great form for those in more quantitative and cutting-edge sciences, for whom author (last name, first initial) and year of publication are most relevant.
When I was done, my article looked ridiculous. It seemed ludicrous to include (1909) and (1927) in the citations of my secondary sources. It just seemed wrong to punctuate quotes from Quicksand with “Larsen, N.”, when for heaven’s sake she’s Nella Larsen, a really interesting lady and one of my favorite authors who died a long time ago. Further, Harvard referencing only requires page numbers when you are making a direct quote or reference to a very specific passage of consulted text; in a literary analysis, nearly all of your citations are for direct quotes, so you must imagine a very clunky-looking paper in which even my most casual invocations of Nella Larsen’s beautiful prose are ornamented with this (Larsen, N. 1928 p. 150) construction.
I thought of this again today while doing some reading for my dissertation research (hello again, weekend writing retreat!). Now that I’ve practiced Harvard referencing, I can recognize it in the articles I download from JSTOR. I thought again today that my primary objection is the (last name, first initial) convention: Adams, C. and Levi-Strauss, C. look very out of place to me, like they are co-signing a lab report and not authoring provocative (if sometimes disagreeable) theory. It disappears them, in a way: I know who Carol Adams and Claude Levi-Strauss are, but I might not recognize the abbreviated versions of their names when skimming a bibliography.
On the other hand, that is possibly a feature, not a bug: maybe it’s not so bad to have a theory un-shadowed by the charismatic personage who penned it, and maybe it’s not so bad to not know by looking that the first alphabetical C. is a woman and the second C. a man.
In conclusion: where can I get a freeware version of Endnote?
Some people (actual human beings, but I re-found the name of it from this page, and I’ve never met this guy: http://designedtoinspire.com/drupal/node/648 ) recommend http://www.zotero.org/ as an Endnote alternative. Note that started as a browser plugin (to highlight and reference stuff in, for example, JSTOR), but there are also MS Word and OpenOffice plugins: http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_installation_for_zotero_2.1
There’s long been complaint in the [computer] science (there aren’t many women in CS, but marginally more than some other hard sciences, and they’re outspoken) journal arena about the de-sexing of authors by abbreviating their given name. I don’t care to weigh in on whether that was the point when (all the authors were male anyway and) the styles were established, and having the given name doesn’t always answer that question anyway, but it’s silly that we keep doing it.
Well, see, that point still has me teetering on indecision. Is it better to have womens’ names spelled out so that one can see (at least in some cases) that they are indeed present? Visibility matters, I think that’s probably what the outspoken CS women are speaking out about.
On the other hand, “de-sexing” the names does kind of suggest that the gender doesn’t matter, and if you assume that all the initialed names are male, that’s your problem. I lean more toward the “visibility matters” school myself, but I can see a couple of points in favor of being nonspecific about name (and therefore gender, and probably a few other things as well).
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