References

Referencing all sources you use in written work properly is one of the most important skills you will learn at university. Fortunately, you no longer have to do this entirely by hand.

I strongly encourage you to install Zotero, a free tool for reference management that supports practically all citation styles. Zotero will save you a lot of time, but please be careful: it will not automatically make your references correct. When adding a source, check it carefully for errors, and always double-check your bibliography before submitting your paper. Don’t blame mistakes on Zotero.

You are free to pick whichever citation style you prefer, but I recommend the style used by the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP), which is available for Zotero here. This style uses author-date citations (“Harvard”), which means citations are given in the text rather than in footnotes. Below I briefly summarise these guidelines and slightly expand on them in some areas.

General

  1. Please make sure to include all sources you use in the text in the bibliography at the end. Do not include sources you have read but not used in the text. Double-check your bibliography before submitting.
  2. When you include two or more publications by the same author from the same year, distinguish them by adding letters to the year of publication, for example Jones 2000a, 2000b, 2000c.
  3. When citing more than one source in the same reference, order them alphabetically and separate them using semicolons, for example Adams 2002; Burns and Jones 1999a, 1999b; Colbert 2010.
  4. When you already refer to the author(s) in the sentence itself, only add the year of publication in brackets, as in “Smith (2015) noted that…”.
  5. When a reference has three or more authors, only state the first author followed by et al., for example Smith et al. 2014. Please note that this only applies to the in-text citation. In the bibliography, please list all authors.
  6. Include page numbers in your in-text citations, for example Smith 2015: 15. You should always let the reader know where to find the specific information you are referring to.

Below I show how different types of sources appear in full in the bibliography at the end.

Scholarly sources

Journal articles

  • Dür, A., Mateo, G. and Thomas, D. C. (2010) ‘Negotiation theory and the EU: The state of the art’, Journal of European Public Policy 17(5): 613–618.
  • Tallberg, J. (2008) ‘Bargaining power in the European Council’, Journal of Common Market Studies 46(3): 685–708.
  • Zimmermann, H. (2016) ‘Balancing sustainability and commerce in international negotiation: The EU and its fisheries partnership agreements’, Journal of European Public Policy, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2016.1146324.

The final source refers to a so-called “online first” or “early view” version of an article, i.e. an article that is not yet available in print and therefore has no volume, issue or page numbers yet. In these cases, please add the digital object identifier (DOI), which is a permanent string identifying publications.

Books and edited volumes

  • Moravcsik, A. (1998) The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  • Wallace, H., Pollack, M. A. and Young, A. R. (eds) (2015) Policy-Making in the European Union, 7th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Note that edited volumes are included here mainly for completeness. Whenever you refer to chapters in edited volumes, you will need to follow another pattern, as shown below. This also applies to the introduction, even when it is written by the editors and carries the same title as the edited volume. Therefore, you will almost never include edited volumes in your bibliography as such, but usually refer to specific chapters.

  • Young, A. R. (2015) ‘The European policy process in comparative perspective’, in H. Wallace, M. A. Pollack and A. R. Young (eds), Policy-Making in the European Union, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 46–71.

Empirical and primary sources

Reports by think tanks

  • Kurpas, S., Grøn, C. and Kaczyński, P. M. (2008) ‘The European Commission after enlargement: Does more add up to less?’, CEPS Special Report, Brussels: Centre for European Policy Studies, available at https://www.ceps.eu/publications/european-commission-after-enlargement-does-more-add-less (accessed September 2016).

Use material from think tanks only sparingly, mostly for empirical background, and prefer peer-reviewed academic sources in your theory section. These sources are also a bit difficult to implement with Zotero. As a work-around, I save reports as books and note the series of the report, for example “CEPS Special Report”, in the book series field, which is not displayed by default. In the final bibliography, you need to manually add the report series, italicise it, de-italicise the title and put the title within single quotation marks.

Journalistic sources

  • Financial Times (2006) UK urges EU to ease trade laws for poor nations, 16 October, available at https://www.ft.com/content/e6f81cb4-5c66-11db-9e7e-0000779e2340 (accessed October 2016).

Please use the name of the newspaper as the “author” rather than the name of the reporter. I like being able to quickly spot the difference between academic sources, where the author’s last name appears first, and journalistic sources, where the newspaper title appears first.

EU documents

  • European Commission (2009) ‘Report from the Commission on the working of committees during 2008’, COM(2009) 335 Final, available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2009:0335:FIN:EN:PDF (accessed July 2013).
  • European Commission (2013) ‘Key facts on the Joint Africa-EU Strategy’, MEMO/13/367, available at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-367_en.htm (accessed October 2016).
  • European Commission (2016) ‘EU and Egypt to step up cooperation on socio-economic development’, IP/16/3395, available at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-3395_en.htm (accessed July 2015).
  • European Community (2006) ‘Regulation (EC) No. 1905/2006 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 establishing a financing instrument for development cooperation’, published in OJ L 378, available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32006R1905 (accessed July 2015).
  • European Parliament (2010) ‘Draft report on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down the rules and general principles concerning mechanisms for control by member states of the Commission’s exercise of implementing powers’, PE441.207v02-00, available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+COMPARL+PE-441.207+02+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN (accessed July 2013).

The Treaty on European Union (TEU) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) do not need to be included in your references. It is sufficiently clear what this refers to without a separate reference. But if you need to quote earlier versions, please indicate this clearly in the text, for example Art. 12 TEU (consolidated version 2002) or Art. 133 TEC (consolidated version 1992).