How to write a Reference section: the Reference list

Be careful you know what your teacher or lecturer is looking for, References or a Bibliography. Only articles and books you have cited in the text should appear in the Reference list (and vice-versa), whereas a bibliography includes any background reading that might have inspired your writing in some way.

The majority of reference styles ask you to show the page numbers where the article was found, and as above, this might be expressed with an em dash, or not. You might have to write the range in full (e.g. 11017–11053) or in a contracted form (11017–53). 

Copy and paste examples of the required reference style at the top of your reference list so you can easily make sure your references are presented the same — Don’t forget to delete the examples before you save the last version and hand it in!

If you are using the Author-Date system your list will be in alphabetical order. 

If you have used the Vancouver system, your list will be in numerical order.

With both systems however, there will be a certain way of presenting the Who, When, Where (and maybe When) information). As you can see in the ABEL INSIGHT above, the best way is to refer to an example of your specific referencing style and not to rely on your referencing software or citethisforme etc. to get it right every time. 

For example:

ARTICLE IN A PRINT JOURNAL

Sondheimer, N., and Lindquist, S. (2000) Yeast cells and their role in producing bubbles in bread. Journal of Molecules and Cells. 5(4), 163-172.

ARTICLE IN AN ONLINE JOURNAL

Regmi, P. R. et al. (2017) ‘Guide to the design and application of online questionnaire surveys’, Nepal Journal of Epidemiology, [online] 6(4), pp. 640–644. Available from <https://doi.org/10.3126/nje.v6i4.17258> [Accessed 11 November 2019]

BOOK

Cowan, W. M., Jessell, T. M., and Zipursky, S. L. (1997). Molecular and Cellular Approaches to Neural Development. New York: Oxford University Press.

If there are articles or books in your reference list by people with the same surname — or even the same research group — that were published in the same year, you will have to differentiate between them in the References list, and use the same method in your in-text citations, for example (the years in bold are to show you the difference, there is no need to do that in your Reference list):

Wu Z, Liang J, Wang C, Zhao X, Zhong X, Cao X, Li G, He J, Yi M (2018a) Overexpression of lily HsfA3s in Arabidopsis confers increased thermotolerance and salt sensitivity via alterations in proline catabolism. Journal of experimental botany 69 (8):2005-2021. doi:10.1093/jxb/ery035

Wu Z, Liang J, Zhang S, Zhang B, Zhao Q, Li G, Yang X, Wang C, He J, Yi M (2018b) A Canonical DREB2-Type Transcription Factor in Lily Is Post-translationally Regulated and Mediates Heat Stress Response. Frontiers in plant science 9:243. doi:10.3389/fpls.2018.00243

When to use "et al."

As you can see in the second example, the article was published by a research group, but only the first author is named — all the other people are grouped together under the latin term “et al.”, meaning “everyone else” :) This may seem a little unfair to the other people who worked on the article, but that’s the way it is sometimes! 

The referencing style might say you only need to write down the first author, or sometimes it is the first six, and everyone else after that is “et al.”. Again, the key is consistency and the best advice is to find an example and stick to it. 

This advice applies to how you write “et al.” in your text as well. Sometimes it is with the punctuation (Pearson et al., 2008); sometimes it is without the punctuation (Morris et al, 2018) or (Wang et al 2018); and sometimes you have to write any latin term, including “et al.” in italics (Carlson et al. 2020). 

Some subjects and disciplines might insist that the first time you cite an article, all the authors are mentioned (Adams, Brockington, Ponte, Dryzek, Robertson, and Schumacher, 1993), and every subsequent mention is just the first author (Adams et al., 1993).