oscola.pdf. - Mirrors.med.harvard.edu

whereas one which has been created without them will require substantial
changes.
• In the case of names, the addition of periods is essential to make sure
that initials are recognised as such.
So, for instance, enter:
...
title = {Hamble Fisheries Ltd. v. L Gardner \& Sons Ltd.}
Names
The biber program is pretty good at coping with names in a variety of forms:
‘John Smith’ or ‘Smith, John’ will both end up being correct. But be consistent.
There are three things you do need to watch:
Dates
• When giving the name of an institution as an author or editor, make
sure that you enclose it in braces:
...
author = {{Department of Health}}
If you don’t do this then as far as biber is concerned this will get
turned into ‘Health D of’ for the purposes of constructing bibliography,
which is not what you want!
• When giving lists of names, separate them with ‘and’ not commas:
author = {First Author and Second Author and Third Author} [6]
• When giving initials, make sure you add a full stop and space after
each initial, so that biber knows it’s dealing with an initial and not a
(very short) name:
author = {Hart, H. L. A.} [7]
This will get printed as HLA Hart. If you forget the initials, it will end
up being printed (wrongly) as H L A Hart.
A date should be entered in the form yyyy-mm-dd, and a range of dates in
the form yyyy-mm-dd:
1970-04-02 4 February 1970
1990-01-03/1991-10-30 3 January 1990–30 October 1991
In many cases it is unnecessary to enter a complete date (though it is
always permissible to do so). Ranges are rarely required for compliance with
oscola. 13
13 They are needed only when referring to sessions of Parliament: see oscola, 40.
The Bibliographic Database 11
[4]
[5]