How do I reference multiple items by the same author… in the Cranfield Author-date style?

In research you will often come across an author or partnership of authors who write regularly on a topic. If they are particularly prolific, you may even find they have published multiple pieces of work in the same calendar year. This could play havoc with the citations and references in your writing – but only if you let it!

Obviously items with the same authors but which are published in different years will be listed chronologically in your references, but what do you do with a group of items with the same authors which were all published in the same year?

The trick is to allocate each one of these items a letter, from a-z. Let’s say they are all written by two imaginary authors – Weasley, F. and Weasley, G. – and were all published in 2016. We allocate the letter ‘a’ to the first article we refer to in our text, placing the ‘a’ after the date of publication. See the examples here:

Weasley, F. and Weasley, G. (2016a) ‘Article about magic’, Journal of Magic, 34(1), pp. 23-31.

To the second article, we allocate a ‘b’. As follows:

Weasley, F. and Weasley, G. (2016b) Book about magic. London: Wizard Press.

And the third…

Weasley, F. and Weasley, G. (2016c) ‘Entrepreneurship in the wizard world’, Journal of Magic, 34(4), pp. 109-147.

And so on…

So your references would look like those above and your in-text citations would mention only the author(s) and date – so  (Weasley and Weasley, 2016a), (Weasley and Weasley, 2016b)…

Any questions about references or citations – or any aspect whatsoever of referencing – please contact MIRC or the Kings Norton Library.

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