Authoring a PhD

Endnote
as the basis for all your references.
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Ideally
your university will provide one of these packages as part of its
central IT facilities, giving you free access when you work on
campus. But most doctoral students also work extensively from
a home PC now, so you will also need a copy of the same soft-
ware for home or personal use, which your university IT serv-
ices should be able to supply at a strongly discounted price. 
So long as you can meet the cost, this initial investment will
normally pay off many times over in several ways. The package
will store all your citations in a single database. You enter the
full details only once but the packages can then deliver cita-
tions in many different alternative formats, enough to satisfy
even journals with the most esoteric requirements. You thereby
save enormously on retyping or copying across references
between other documents. With a central database, finding the
references you need for any chapter, conference paper or article
can also be accomplished at the touch of a button. In many
universities you can also now download book or article details
from the main library catalogue or Web-based bibliographic
systems straight into your referencing database, without any
retyping or editing on your part. Apart from their extra cost, the
only drawbacks of the packages are the learning costs of 
mastering a new separate package and of making it work with
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less commonplace word processors (such as Linux or Apple
ones). But the integration difficulties have now been solved for
the major PC word processors. Your university library or IT serv-
ices should provide free training courses in using their preferred
referencing package, which are well worth attending.
Alternatively you may choose not to employ a specialized
package, but to try and get along with creating a large central
references file in your existing word processor (such as Word or
Wordperfect). There are several ways to do this, of which the
worst is just to create a straight text file. Instead try to find out
how you can construct a searchable table or database in the
package that will meet your needs. Word and Wordperfect also
have very sophisticated facilities that can help here. For exam-
ple, both include a powerful facility to automatically switch
footnotes over into endnotes, or to convert endnotes into foot-
notes. You can also use a database that comes as part of your
standard office package (like Access in Microsoft Office), from
which material can be easily moved across to your word proces-
sor. These options are well worth exploring, especially because
most of us use only a fraction of the facilities in our extremely
powerful word-processing software. If you have not used the rel-
evant menus or buttons before, try searching the on-line ‘Help’
pages for tutorials, look in the company’s package manual (if
you have one), or consult one of the many helpful guides to
packages written by external authors and stocked in bookshops.
Best of all, ask around amongst your colleagues for someone
who is using these facilities and get them to show you how they
work. Whatever you do about handling references, make sure
that you start very early on in your PhD work; that you do it on
a PC (bin that card index if you still have one!); that your
approach is a systematic one which creates a centralized refer-
ence storage facility; and that you always regularly update this
central file (and back it up several times) as you go along.
Harvard referencing
This approach is one of two widely used referencing systems
which I review in detail here because they meet the principles
of full referencing and one-stop look-up. (The other alternative
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is endnotes, discussed below.) Harvard referencing is perhaps
the most widely used approach in academic life. There has been
a long-term trend for more journals and book publishers to
switch over to it, mainly because it saves space and tends to
deliver a cleaner and simpler text than do notes of any kind.
The system requires only two elements, an in-text reference,
and a single, integrated bibliography at the end of the thesis,
book or article.
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The