Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

211 REFERENCE LISTS
editorial (or other) reasons. For example, if we go by what is on the cover, we
would give the references in (3):
(3) Matthews, P. H. (1993). Grammatical theory in the United States from
Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matthews, Peter (2001). A Short History of Structural Linguistics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The two are written by the same person. Such discrepancies are not unusual;
the problem is how to deal with them. The simplest answer is to leave them
alone. But it is possible to spell things out a little, using the notation in (4):
(4) Matthews, P[eter] H. (1993). Grammatical theory in the United States
from Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
The main difficulty with (4) is that it may not be possible to carry it through
consistently, since you may not know or be able to discover the given names of
all the relevant people (in the case of the edited volume listed in (2), for
instance, I know the given names of only two of the four editors). This leads to
even less consistency in presentation.
An alternative is to use initials for everyone, and many publishers prefer this.
It is certainly simpler to apply consistently. Some feminists argue that it gives
less visibility to women writers because people tend to assume that authors are
male, but it could also be argued to be treating women and men equally by
masking everyone’s gender. Less controversially, full given names may allow
someone trying to locate the work to distinguish between various J. Smiths in
a library catalogue or bibliographic database, and this can be helpful.
Occasionally, especially with reference works, there may be no author or
editor mentioned. One possible solution here is to use ‘anon.’ (meaning ‘anonymous’),
but that is usually restricted to cases where a single, unknown author
is involved. The alternative is to list such works by their titles, rather than by
their authors, even though it goes against the general pattern of the references
used.
Publication date
In principle, the date that you want to give for a work is the date of publication
of the edition you have consulted. In the case of periodical articles, this is
seldom a problem, since the journal will be clearly marked with a year.
However, in some cases the year of publication may not match the ostensible
year to which the periodical belongs, and it is then the year of publication which