The Constant Librarian

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Harvard System. (Er, not.)

The other day I spotted someone citing a reference on Twitter. Fab stuff; it’s good to see people helping others connect with useful sources. However, the reference was constructed, very carefully and correctly – meticulously, even – using the Harvard system. Which meant that it took at least two, if not three, tweets to fully convey all the details.

I should at this point hold my hands up and state that I’m a Vancouver system girl. This may be partly because I work largely with medical research, where Vancouver is widely used (albeit with different variations depending on individual journal style), so I’m much more familiar with it than Harvard. But I’ve also grown to love it for its relative simplicity. And every time I see a Harvard reference, my inner KISSer* starts rumbling and grumbling and finally going ‘Aarghh!’ at what I see as totally extraneous and unnecessary punctuation.

I realise that I may be overreacting a little here.

A system is a system. I get it. I’ve had a quick mooch on the internet to see if I can find out some reasoning behind it and, while I’ve located some info about the value of citing dates in-text,† I’ve not found anything yet that tells me why somebody somewhere deemed it such a good thing for the bibliography to have So. Much. Punctuation. Punctuation to no purpose, that is – you’ll have just spotted my own use of extraneous, non-grammatical punctuation to Make. A. Point. That’s different 🙂  But, when all a reference is designed to do is point the reader toward the interesting source that’s being cited, why do we need a full point after every initial and a comma between surname and initial? Really, why?! It gets my goat badly enough <<insert bleating goat noise here>> when I see this system in print, but I think seeing it on Twitter made me reach a new level of ‘Aarghh’ness. <<insert whole ruckus of bleating goats waiting for their tea and probably being harassed by sheep and getting pretty damn cross about it>>

Twitter is perhaps the most notable form of communication where brevity is a virtue. In fact, brevity is dictated by the maximum tweet length of 140 characters. The idea that anyone wishing to cite a correct reference has to take three tweets to do it just makes me raise my eyes to the heavens (I’m an agnostic, but you never know, there might be a friendly seagull flapping about waiting to poop in my eye to give me the wake-up call I need to stop being so flippin’ nerdy…).

But I digress.

It made me wonder if librarians could pioneer the use of a form of referencing designed specifically for Twitter, i.e. using the minimum number of characters possible to convey all relevant information.‡

I have to say that there are shortened forms of Vancouver – which I’ve seen on medical congress posters, for example, where space is at a premium – that could be adopted here. For instance:

Marshman G et al. Annoying Referencing Journal 2013;42:1-10

(Even better if the journal has an official abbreviated title that can be used; for obvious reasons, BMJ is one of my favourites, and if I come across a journal that uses a full word in its title, I can’t stop myself from quickly Googling or PubMedding it to check that it can’t be shortened…)

Yes, I know that any librarian conducting library-related CPD/research is likely to be using Harvard and probably has it embedded in their bones – but if librarians are good at one thing it’s adapting to new and changing circumstances. So why not start here?

Thoughts, opinions and other views welcome below! And if you are a fan of Harvard, fear not, I won’t bite – just bark a lot 🙂

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*Keep It Short & Simple.
†Interestingly, it seems that Harvard was devised by scientists and Vancouver by humanities/arts scholars, because of the greater significance attached to publication date in scientific research. I’ll bear that in mind for the next pub quiz…
‡And yes, I realise that stripping out a few commas and full points from a reference probably won’t make a huge amount of difference to the length of a tweet, but my point about simplicity remains. And in Twitter, every character has to earn its place. We see enough greengrocer’s’ apostrophe’s’ in real life – we don’t need comma’,s joining forces with them! Stop the rampage!!§
§Ahem. As you were.