Referencing explained

Different cultures have different rules about the order of people’s names. For example, in many Western cultures, the given (personal) name comes first, and the family name (surname) comes last. Meanwhile, in East Asian cultures, as well as in parts of India and in Hungary, names are usually written the opposite way round, with the family name first and the personal name last. 

Most referencing styles used at the University of Leeds require you to use the “family name, given initials” format when referencing authors’ names, and to only provide the family name (without initials) in the citation. The exception is MHRA, which requires you to use the author’s name exactly as it appears in the original source. 

It can sometimes be difficult to identify which part of someone’s name is the given name or family name, especially if they are from a culture which uses the opposite convention to your own. Here are some tips to help identify the parts of someone’s name:

• Is the name displayed with a comma between the two names, like Obama, Michelle or Yoon, Seongmin? This indicates that the name is being shown in family name, given name order. These example names would be referenced as Obama, M. and Yoon, S.
• If you’re reading the source online, is there a suggested citation or reference? The suggested reference is unlikely to be in the referencing style you will be using in your assignment, but many styles use the family name, initials format which will help you identify the parts of the author’s name. 
• How is the name displayed when the source is cited by other papers? This will give you a good indication of how you should reference it yourself. For example, if we find a paper by Mei-Lin Chen, we could search for other papers citing this paper and look at their reference lists to find out how they referenced this name. In this example, we would see that this name is commonly referenced as Chen, M.L. or M.L. Chen, so we have found out that Chen is the family name. You can search for sources citing a paper in Library Search as well as in some databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. 
• How is the author referred to elsewhere online? If they have a webpage on their institution’s website, it might include a sentence like “Dr. Smith has published several papers on the topic…” (indicating that Smith is their family name) or a list of their publications, showing how their name should normally be formatted in references. 
• If you can’t find any information about the author and can’t find any other sources citing them, try searching on Google for phrases like “people called Shaw”, “people called Ayofemi” etc. This can help you identify whether the name is usually used as a given name or a family name, although this will not always work, as many names can be used as both!