Referencing twins

Have you heard of referencing twins as a thing? I had not heard the term, but once I had heard it, it made perfect sense!

A referencing twin is a second resource we are using, by the same author, published in the same year. a double- or treble-up means that we could potentially have (Smith, 2022) and (Smith, 2022) in our writing, with the reader not knowing to which Smith article we were referring. Confusion, thy name would be referencing.

However, there is an easy answer to provide a map back to the source for those who reads our work. We simply list our references in alpha-numeric order in our reference list, then add a letter to the end of the year bracket, so that when we cited our referencing twins in-text, we draw on the correct item.

We might want to draw on several course materials. So for example we would cite and reference as follows:

In-text: (Smith, 2022a)

Reference: Smith, S. (2022a).Week 1 Preparation. NMIT [Course Materials].

In-text: (Smith, 2022b)

Reference: Smith, S. (2022b). Week 2 Concepts. NMIT [Course Materials].

The next one we would list as 'Smith, 2022c' etc (and if we wanted to quote a particular slide, we use that as our page number).

And a stylier option using actual journals (APA, 2011):

Koriat, A. (2008a). Easy comes, easy goes? The link between learning and remembering and its exploitation in metacognition. Memory & Cognition, 36, 416–428. http://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.2.416

Koriat, A. (2008b). Subjective confidence in one’s answers: The consensuality principle. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 945–959. http://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.34.4.945

It is good to learn these techniques!

Sam

Reference: APA. (2011). Reference Twins: Or, How to Cite Articles With the Same Authors and Same Year. American Psychological Association. https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/10/reference-twins.html