Referencing styles

When writing your essays, you are expected to use the Harvard Referencing style, as described here. 

While there are many different styles of referencing, the Harvard style is selected for the use on this course, as it is one of the styles that are the most friendly to the reader, as the author name and year of publication is communicated directly in the citation, e.g (Lassenius 2022). 

In the technical field, in particular in conference publication, IEEE style references, which consist of a number in square brackets, e.g., [1] are commonly used. This format is very space-efficient, which is good when the number of pages available is limited, but it is very unfriendly to the reader, as checking a reference requires constant flipping to the last page. 

In software engineering, both Harvard-style and IEEE-style citations are widely used. On this course, as stated above, you are required to use the Harvard style.

Bibliographical tools

Handling references manually, regardless of style is not very difficult if a bit tedious. However, in the "real-world", authors of academic texts these days almost exclusively format them using specialized tools. These tools automatically format references correctly, and make it easy to switch between referencing styles. 

Using a bibliographical tool on this course is completely voluntary, but, strongly recommended. Here is a list of some of the more popular ones:

  • EndNote Commercial, available to Aalto students and faculty via download.aalto.fi. Works best with Microsoft Word. Win/Mac. There is an University of Pretoria Harvard template that is available through EndNote.
  • Zotero (free, open-source). Has plug-in for MS Word, and also works with LaTeX and syncs with Overleaf. Win/Mac/Linux
  • JabRef (free, open-source). Works with LaTeX. Win/Mac/Linux.
  • BibDesk (free, open-source). Works with LaTeX. Mac only.
  • For BibTex users - the natbib package with the agsm bibliography style seems to work quite well!

There are many others, like RefWorks, Reference Manager, Mendeley, to name a few. Want to find more? Google is your friend, and also helps you find tutorials related to the tools. Feel free to try them all and pick your favorite :)

Last modified: Tuesday, 19 September 2023, 7:26 AM