Approaching the Year Abroad Project
- defining a topic
- developing a bibliography
- referencing (see the attached sheet for general guidance and an example of a commonly used referencing system)
- challenges and common pitfalls
Referencing other works in your dissertation
It is a good idea to reference quotations and footnotes correctly as you go along, to avoid a last-minute rush at the end. You will need to show mastery of scholarly conventions in your writing – this means getting the details right and showing that you have done your research well. Some of these conventions you will already have come across, eg. italicize titles of books and journals, put in single ‘inverted commas’: articles which are part of an edited volume, journal articles, poems and short stories; for titles in English: capitalize key words; for titles in Spanish: capitalize ONLY the first word of the title. But you will be required to reference quotations in much more detail than you have been used to. There are various sets of bibliographic conventions - it doesn’t matter which you use, but you must be consistent. The following is one of the easiest, clearest and most frequently used.
| How to reference | As a footnote | In the bibliography |
| A book |
Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth, p. 10. |
Martin, Gerald. Journeys Through the Labyrinth (London and New York: Verso, 1991) |
| A journal article |
Carmen Perilli, ‘Un mapa del infierno: la novela argentina entre 1982 y 1992’, p. 96. |
Perilli, Carmen. ‘Un mapa del infierno: la novela argentina entre 1982 y 1992’ in Hispamérica, vol. 24 no. 70 (1995), 95-101 |
| An article in an edited volume |
Ricardo Piglia, ‘Sarmiento the Writer’, p. 130. |
Piglia, Ricardo. ‘Sarmiento the Writer’ in Tulio Halperín Donghi, ed., Sarmiento: Author of a Nation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 127-4 |
This section is also available as a pdf document.
Footnotes
- You don’t need to repeat the name of the author in a footnote that is already in the main text of the essay, eg.:
As Graciela Scheines claims, ‘No hay antítesis entre América y Europa porque ambas se vinculan en un mismo proceso histórico en el que América cumplirá su destino en la medida en que destituye a Europa de su lugar de privilegio’.¹
- Citations from the same source, used in the same paragraph, can simply be referenced with a page number in brackets as follows:
If the label ‘postmodernism’ has any meaning, Piglia argues, it is a recognition that ‘una sociedad no puede funcionar con valores que son antagónicos con sus necesidades, no puede dejarse manejar por una cultura que exalta los valores que buscan desintegrar a esa sociedad’.² On all levels (in literature, in daily life, in politics), a new postmodern culture should reaffirm that which was denied by the transgressive and revolutionary stances of the avant-garde, recognizing that ‘Una sociedad necesita orden, necesita valorar sus tradiciones’ (p. 112).
- Note that all footnotes end with a full stop.
- The footnote number comes after the punctuation mark (eg. full stop or comma).
¹Las metáforas del fracaso: desencuentros y utopias en la cultura argentina, p. 41.
²'Los relatos sociales', pp. 111.