@the_oversabi_researcher: When I say I did my dissertation referencing manually, this is what I mean. I wasn’t sitting down and typing every reference from scratch. 😂 My university library already gives you the citation for the articles you find. Google Scholar does the same thing. So I would copy the reference from either my school library or Google Scholar and paste it into a Word document that I created specifically for my reference list. When I was done, I would highlight the whole list. Then in Microsoft Word, there is that little A–Z button in the menu. I would click it, select ascending order, and Word would arrange my references alphabetically. That was my “manual referencing.” But there was another part I really liked about doing it this way. Because I was physically working through my reference list myself, I became very familiar with it. It almost gave me a photographic memory of the references I had used. And guess what? That actually helped me catch a mistake in my dissertation. I realised that I had accidentally cut out about 2,000 words. 😭 So sometimes, working manually can actually help you understand your own work better. And I didn’t just copy the references and leave them there. When I finished, I checked everything. I checked the order. I checked the in-text citations. I checked the brackets. I checked the formatting. Because Harvard referencing is not just “Harvard referencing.” Universities can have their own specific version of Harvard. I was using the Bolton Harvard referencing style, so I actually printed out the university’s referencing guide and kept the hard copy beside me. Then I went through my references one by one and checked them against the guide. Was it time-consuming? Absolutely. But I knew what I had in my reference list. And that, for me, was the whole point for me.❤️ #MRes #referencing #dissertation #ukstudentlife #PhDstudent

the_oversabi_researcher

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Sunday 20 September 2026 18:11:52 GMT