by unloveablesteve cc licence Flickr
I have some sympathies with the article by Alec Gill in the Times Higher advocating a reduction in the number of citation styles available. He says “Generally, students cannot see the logic behind the petty rules and the permutation of punctuation (brackets, underlinings, single quotation marks, italics, and commas dotted here and there).”
He proposes a method building on the traditional author-year system to include a material type. Thus a newspaper reference would appear like this:
Cavendish, C. 2009 eNewspaper: Insane Spendaholics are Mortgaging our Future, The Times, 20 March
If this leads to some simplification then I’m all for it! You’ll find help with referencing and citation styles here.
