Authoring a PhD Thesis How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation by Patrick Dunleavy

(Brent) #1

include full details on who interviewees were; where and
when you talked to them; how interviews were conducted
(for instance, face-to-face, by phone, using a questionnaire or
a dialogue mode, etc.); and how you recorded the material
(for instance, taped or noted). If you want to cite evidence
from ‘non-attributable’ interviews then referencing issues do
not arise, because you cannot link particular points to any
definite respondent. Instead you need to find a way of
introducing phrases into your main text which give as much
useful contextual information about your informant or source
as possible, while yet fully preserving their anonymity.
Material from ‘off-the-record’ interviews cannot be cited or
referred to at all without breaching normal academic research
ethics. (Make sure that you carefully discuss with your advisor
any possible issues in referencing different kinds of interview
material at the examination stage.) In all these last three
respects there is no significant difference between the
difficulty or ease of citing sources under Harvard referencing
and using alternative systems like endnotes or footnotes.


A final issue worth noting about bibliographies concerns seg-
mentation. A single unified bibliography arranged in a strict and
predictable alphabetic ordering is best for all textual materials.
In some older works, and in the PhD regulations for a few more
old-fashioned universities, it is still possible to find bibliogra-
phies broken up into primary sources (such as unpublished doc-
uments) and secondary or published sources, or even separate
listings for books and articles. All such devices breach the one-
stop look-up principle, because from the in-text reference alone
readers normally cannot tell what kind of source they are being
directed to. With any kind of segmented bibliography they may
have to look in several places to find the reference they need.


Endnotes


The main viable alternative system for referencing consistent
with full citation and one-stop look-up are endnotes.


◆Thein-text referenceis reduced to a minimal superscript
number, as.^8 The numbers should restart at 1 with each new
chapter. The number is automatically entered in your text


130 ◆AUTHORING A PHD

Free download pdf