Editing Guide to technical writing (section)

==References==
* When writing a journal article, always follow the format required by the specific journal.
* When writing your thesis always use Harvard style referencing.  This means you cite using author name and year, rather than by a reference number. For a huge document such as a thesis, the Harvard style is preferred by examiners because they can often recognize a reference from the name and year. This saves them from constantly having to check the references at the end.  Also Harvard style is much easier to manage in a large document, because the references are all at the end alphabetically. In LaTeX, use \cite as normal, and it is the style file that will create the Harvard style. However, when you refer to the reference itself as a noun you must use \citeasnoun.
* For the formatting and style of a reference, you follow the rules of the journal. If you are writing a thesis, because we are electrical & electronic engineers, format it the IEEE way. Simply refer to any published IEEE paper and follow the way they do it.
* Only reference primary sources. Primary sources are published scientific articles.  Encyclopedias are secondary sources and should be avoided; rather find the primary source where the encyclopedia got its information from. In academia, citing Wikipedia is an especially grave sin that can get you metaphorically burned at the stake.  The only context where mentioning Wikipedia is acceptable is if a paper paper on big data or natural language processing, for example, is using swathes of Wikipedia text as a dataset. If the Wikipedia is the actual object of your research then that is ok.