Practice Specials are designed for Law students to practice the skills from SSA workshops in their own time. These specials consist of two parts; one is top tips from an SSA on the topic, and the other part consists of five questions and answer problems.
This page includes top five tips to remember when referencing. Want to practice? Click here!
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1. Not including the journal name, volume, issue and page when referencing articles
When referencing journal articles, simply including the author, title and year of publication isn’t enough (this is why references to journals will usually look a bit longer than references to books..) Instead, for journal articles we need to do a bit more work and find the name of the journal, the volume and the issue number. Thankfully, this information is usually easy to find: on websites such as HeinOnline, you will be able to see the name of the journal somewhere on the page (and you can usually find it at the beginning of the article itself, as well). If you see numbers in the format 10(2), this denotes the volume and issue numbers: 10 being the volume and 2 being the issue. One last piece of information we need is the first page of the article we are referencing . Putting that all together, we get the following rule for referencing articles in footnotes:
[author’s full name], ‘[title of article]’ ([year]) [volume number] ([issue number]) [name of journal] [first page of article].
An example:
1 Andrew Keay, ‘Shareholder Primacy in Corporate Law: Can It Survive? Should It Survive?’ (2010) 7(3) ECFR 369.
Here, ECFR is the abbreviation for the journal, namely the European Company and Financial Law Review. You can either use the abbreviation or the full journal name, both are fully correct according to OSCOLA – but using the abbreviation can help cut the word count if references are included!
2. Not cross-referencing using (n X)
We’re all probably familiar with ibid (short for the Latin ibidem, meaning ‘in the same place’). But ibid can only be used when referencing a source that we already referenced in the footnote directly before the one we’re referencing now. In other words, you can only use ibid immediately after the footnote containing the source you want to cross-reference. For example:
3 Sarah Worthington (ed), Sealy & Worthington’s Text, Cases & Materials in Company Law (11th edn, 2016) 30.
4 ibid 37.
Here, the numbers at the end of the footnotes are so-called ‘pinpoints’ to specific pages.
If we want to cross-reference a source we referenced in full a few footnotes back, we need to use a different shortcut, namely:
Y [author’s last name] (n X).
where X is the footnote where we can find the full reference. In other words, if I cited The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith in full in footnote 3 and I want to reference it again in footnote 14, I could say:
14 Smith (n 3).
We can use any ‘shortcut’ when cross-referencing like this, not just the author’s last name. For example, if I cited R (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union in full in footnote 5 and I want to reference it again in footnote 7, instead of repeating that mouthful, I’d say something like:
7 R (Miller) (n 5).
Finally, if you’re referencing more than one work by the same author in the same piece, it is recommended to include a (shortened) title of the article/book after the author’s last name so that the reader can easily identify which work you are referring to – for example: Smith, The Wealth of Nations (n 3).
3. Citing books and articles incorrectly in the bibliography
In OSCOLA, references in the footnotes and the bibliography/reference list (which is required for some assignments and should be placed at the very end of your paper) are mostly the same. One
important difference, however, is that whereas in the footnotes we need to include the full name of the author/editor(s), in the bibliography we write their last name followed by the initial of their first name. This is because secondary sources (books and articles) in the bibliography are listed in alphabetical order going by the author’s last name. Another difference is that, in footnotes, it is good practice to ‘pinpoint’ to relevant pages/paragraphs. This is not done in the bibliography because we are referencing the entire work, not a specific page or paragraph. Finally, an extremely technical difference is that we need to put a full stop at the end of footnotes, but this is not done when referencing in the bibliography. For example, a reference to a book in a footnote looks like this:
1 Gleider Hernández, International Law (2nd edn, OUP 2022) 125.
The same reference in the bibliography would look like this:
Hernández G, International Law (2nd edn, OUP 2022)
Note the difference in how the author’s name is entered as well as the absence of a pinpoint and full stop in the latter reference
4. Not including the neutral and law report citation when referencing UK cases (post-2001)
Referencing case law can be tricky, not least because of the sheer number of law report citations you might see when you look up a case on Westlaw or Lexis. It is important to differentiate between the neutral citation (only available for cases reported after 2001), and the law report citation(s). A neutral citation might look like this: [2017] UKSC 5. It tells us the court that decided the case (in this case, the Supreme Court), and that this was the fifth decision that court handed down in 2017. A law report citation tells us where in a particular law report we can find the case. In general, it is recommended to use the ICLR law reports series (AC, KB, QB, Ch, Fam) if these are available – if not, then use other reports such as the All England Law Reports (All ER) or the Weekly Law Reports (WLR). The law report citation for the Miller case is: [2018] AC 61 (this can easily be found on Westlaw or other databases). The tricky part is that, to cite this case, we need to include both the neutral and law report citations, like this:
1 R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5, [2018] AC 61.
For cases before 2001, there is no neutral citation, so we can just use the law report citation and put the abbreviated name of the court in brackets afterwards:
1 Re Smith and Fawcett Ltd [1942] Ch 304 (CA).
Here, CA stands for Court of Appeal.
5. Not including the chapter when referencing contributions to edited volumes
Edited volumes are a type of book which, instead of being written by one or more authors, contains chapters written by different authors which are then made into a book by the editors. You can tell an edited volume apart from an ordinary book because the abbreviation (ed) or (eds) will appear after the name(s) of the editor(s). (ed) is used for one editor and (eds) is used when there are multiple. To cite a chapter in an edited volume, we need to basically divide the reference into two parts: first we reference the chapter, then the book itself. For example:
4 Charlie Weir, ‘The Market for Corporate Control’ in Mike Wright and others (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Governance (OUP 2013).
Note that the book is cited just like any other book according to OSCOLA; the only difference here is that we need to also include the author and title of the chapter. Pay particular attention to the ‘in’ separating the reference to the chapter and the reference to the book.