Authoring a PhD

amount of time and attention amongst PhD students, especially in the humanities and social sciences. There is no reason that it should. I examine the principles on which your referencing needs to be built how to choose an appropriate system and two standard systems that do the job simply, Harvard referencing and endnotes.
Principles for referencing
The need to know criterion provides the basic rationale for what should be sourced, and in how much detail. Two, three or four readers, the examiners, have particular responsibilities to guard the portals of the PhD against incorrect or stolen work.
Meeting their needs does impose a much higher standard of referencing than is common in academic books or even most journal articles. For instance, in these sources authors extensively use whole book citations, where they designate a book as a source without specifying whereto look within it, as (Foucault. Doctoral authors should strictly avoid this approach,
because in theory the examiners should be able to check every source referenced. Obviously it would take them along time if they had to read the whole of Foucault’s book to find the one point which you say is in there. So thesis references must always be fully precise, ideally sourcing citations to particular pages, as
(Foucault, 1995, pp. 56–9), or at worst indicating a specific chapter, as (Foucault, 1995, Ch. 4). In practice the examiners will very rarely followup references, unless they have reason to think either that you have misquoted another researcher or perhaps that there is unacknowledged quotation (plagiarism) in your text, which is a quick way to instantly fail your doctorate.
Yet they will rightly become a bit suspicious about your scholarly qualities if they see that you are providing less than full and precise details for every citation and quotation.
Your referencing system also needs to reflect a more general principle of good authoring, namely that it should prove a
one-stop lookup facility. Readers should have to go only to one place to follow through the sourcing of all quotations and citations. They must never be asked to look in two or more places in order to find out which source is being referred to. WRITING CLEARLY 1

For instance, it is still very common to find books where an author uses footnotes or endnotes in the main text, but when you turn to the note there is a Harvard referencing system in use, showing only Smith (2001). This means that you have to look further on again in the bibliography at the end to find out which source this is. Another example of two-stage lookup occurs often inhumanities disciplines (like history) where many authors still use pointless and anachronistic Latin abbreviations. Here you may find in an endnote or footnote a reference such as White, op. cit.’ or White, loc. cit.’, where the Latin bits mean the same work as when White was last cited. You then have to embark on a complete magical mystery tour of looking back through dozens of previous notes, trying to find the last time White was cited. The most careless and discourteous authors will pursue this op. cit. logic across several chapters,
asking you to ransack possibly hundreds of notes to find the last time White was referenced. This approach would be a very rash one to adopt with PhD examiners or assessors. Both these examples illustrate the dangers to you as an author of not using a one-stop lookup system. If readers have to dig around in several different places to track down where you got a point from,
they will form a worse view of your text and of your competence as an author compared with if you make their task straightforward.
Within the two principles of meeting the examiners need to know precise sources for everything quoted or cited, and providing a one-stop lookup, try to guard against a tendency towards over-referencing. A classic thesis paranoia symptom is inserting supporting literature for every point, even ones that no one in their right mind would dispute or need to do further reading about, such as The United Kingdom is a country with along and chequered history (Davies, 1999; Trevelyan, Chesterton, 1923).’ If you find this problem in your text, check whether you are overciting more generally. Later on an excessively overcautious referencing approach also signals PhD thesis’
immediately to journal editors and reviewers, and to book publishers. So it may make it harder than it otherwise would be to get your work published. Referencing details are also generally unattractive, so if overdone they can detract quite a lot from the look and feel of your text 2 AUTHORING AP H D

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