Forfatterårsystemer

Forfatterårsystemer, also known as author‑date citation styles, are a family of scholarly referencing conventions in which the author’s surname and the publication year are included in-text. The format is generally (Author, Year) for parenthetical citations and Author (Year) for narrative citations. The system is widely used in the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities, providing a quick way to identify source material without requiring the reader to consult the reference list for the year of publication.

Typical styles that employ forfatterårsystems include APA (American Psychological Association), Harvard, Chicago Author‑Date, and ACS (American Chemical Society). Each of these styles differs in the specifics of punctuation, the treatment of multiple works by the same author in a single year, and the arrangement of the reference list. For example, APA requires the year to follow the author’s name immediately, whereas Harvard may invite a comma between the year and the title in the bibliography.

Advantages of forfatterårsystemer encompass ease of locating sources in large bibliographies and the ability to recognise at a glance the recency of research. They also encourage consistent citation practices across disciplines. However, they can be cumbersome when citing works by authors with multiple publications in the same year; suffixes such as “a” and “b” are appended to the year. Additionally, file sorting in reference managers can be confusing because the year must be stored separately from the author name.

In digital publishing, some journals adopt hybrid conventions, blending numbered and author‑year citations to accommodate different readership expectations. Overall, forfatterårsystemer remain popular because they balance succinctness in the text with comprehensive bibliographic detail.