Which referencing style does your department actually use?

Referencing marks are almost never lost on the well-known rules. They are lost on variants — the specific punctuation your faculty uses, whether they want a DOI, how they want an edited volume handled — and none of that is in the published style guide.

Harvard is a family, not a standard

This surprises students more than anything else in referencing. APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE each have a governing body and a definitive manual. Harvard does not. It is a general name for author–date referencing, and institutions publish their own variants that differ in punctuation, capitalisation, ordering and how they treat electronic sources.

This means a Harvard guide found online may be internally consistent and still wrong for your department. The only authoritative source is the guide your faculty issued.

Where to find your actual requirements

1. The module handbook or thesis regulations — usually the operative document
2. Your library’s referencing guide, which institutions often maintain per faculty
3. The assessment brief, which sometimes specifies a variant the handbook does not
4. Recent theses deposited by your department, which show what was actually accepted

The source types that go wrong

Journal articles and books are straightforward and every guide covers them. The errors accumulate elsewhere:

• Chapters in edited volumes, where both the chapter author and the editors must appear correctly
• Translated works, which usually need both the original and the translation dated
• Legislation, case law and EU instruments, each with jurisdiction-specific forms
• Technical standards and reports, which are often cited as if they were books
• Datasets and software, increasingly required to be cited and rarely covered in teaching
• Grey literature — policy papers, working papers, institutional reports — which style guides handle inconsistently

Reference managers help, but they are not correct by default

Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote save real time, and they reproduce whatever metadata they imported. Publisher records routinely contain the wrong capitalisation, missing page ranges, or an author listed as an institution. The output is only as good as the library, so check entries as you add them rather than at the end.

A specific and common failure: importing a title in title case into a style that requires sentence case. The manager will not correct it, and a reference list where half the entries are capitalised differently is immediately visible to a marker.

The check worth doing before submission

1. Every in-text citation appears in the reference list
2. Every reference-list entry is cited at least once in the text
3. Dates match between the citation and the entry
4. Author name spellings match, including diacritics
5. Numbered styles are still in order after your last round of edits

The last one catches people out repeatedly. In IEEE and Vancouver, moving a paragraph changes the correct numbering of everything after it, and the reference list has to be rebuilt to match.