Why we refer to the work of other people is discussed in Citing other work.
Citing and referencing other works can be done in several ways. Different organisations have their own referencing styles.
This section briefly discusses the 2 main referencing systems used in publications: the author–date (or name–year; Harvard) system and the notation (numbered) system. Which system is used determines how in-text citations appear in the main text, and how the reference list looks.
Most of this section presents the Biotext referencing style, which is an author–date style that is used irrespective of whether an author–date or notational format is used.
This section covers: