Why are universities still teaching referencing styles?

Duh. Everyone--students and professors--needs to understand different forms of referencing in order to use them properly. This parallels AI--which the author mentions. One has to learn to use it properly. This is not rocket science, which also has its own reference system.

There is NO "Harvard Reference Style." None. There is the most popular in the world--the APA or American Psychology Association in its multiple forms. Then there is University of Chicago Manual of Style and MLA or Modern Language Association. No "Harvard Reference Style." Period. You need to distinguish full foot- and endnotes from Author/Date either in text, bottom of each page; end of chapter or article; end of book For your i nformation, I was taught traditional full document numbered footnotes/endnotes as a high school student in the 1960s It is not rocket science

Understanding referencing is currently important - it simplifies students' lives and makes for consistency if there is an institutional standard which is supported by software and well-documented - APA is the best candidate for most subjects. What the author misses is that pressing a button to insert a citation/ reference is dependent on the data quality in the source. Is it complete? Are abbreviations and capitals used consistently? Is a DOI or other internet source required? Is the citation style appropriate in the text? While most of the work can be automated, it still required knowledge and judgement to produce high quality work. A bigger challenge now is fake references created by AI. This needs more attention and better tools to detect the plausible lies created by AI.

Talk about making mountains out of molehills. I've worked in 4 universities. And not once were I or peers taught reference styles. On consultation with supervisors we chose the tools we used to typeset papers including ibliography supoort [Bibtex or Endnote] then simply selected whichever citation style was mandated for the publication [paper or University's own rules on thesis presentation. job done. Possibly this is a problem for the authors' own discipline -in which case the title of the article is poorly chosen.

Consistency and following styles is a extremely important skill. Teaching referencing allows practice at scale, much preferable to finding that capitals, full-stops in titles, section numbers are inconsistent in a PhD thesis, or worse in a report for your employer, many years later. There is also the old garbage-in, garbage-out adage: many databases wrongly parse the references. I passed my Edtior's eye over the remarkable genomics-for-AI paper from Google/Instadeep, AgroNT, published in Nature Communications this summer: nearly half the references are wrongly formatted!

This is a discipline specific issue as well as pointed put above. But seriously, students should be generally aware of the concept of academic style and the existence of referencing and of the various systems and of consistency etc. They can deploy the preferred style via the software options. We can get too pedantic about all this however. It's a technical aspect to what we do.

It seems that the authors have never had to search for materials cited by a dead url link. All the programs I have taught on in Australia, Canada and England have introduced students to reference management software, and indeed make a system freely available to students and support it with short courses and a help desk. Law has a very specific referencing style that is expected in court submissions and followed in all court judgements I have read. I would consider it irresponsible if any law school ever dreamed of not teaching the law referencing style to law students, and insisted that students were competent in it by the end of 1st year.

The ability to quote, cite, and reference is just as important now as it ever was... perhaps even more so with more and more dodgy information out there and people given to making sweeping statements of opinion without any supporting argument, let alone poor use of generative AI (when it's working, ChatGPT had issues this morning...). As for referencing by hyperlink, slippery customers, webmasters - keep amending pages and moving things around. It's easier to use the Wayback Machine if you have a proper reference to whatever you're after... and what do you do if the internet isn't working? Go look it up in book or journal.

MHRA is indeed best. (Author, date) systems are mostly an intrusive, colonialist invasion by empiricist and positivist mindsets. The rabid rage many institutions and even publishers display when you want to stick to good old footnotes, shows referencing is deeply caught up in epistemo-ideology. Never mind trying to use venerable traditions such as Stephanus or Becker numbers, which everyone should know, outside of their niche areas. We should embrace consistency and clarity as much as individuality and diversity. The author is right. And the cumulative, empirical sciences should switch to (numbers) and doi.

It is amazing how worked up colleagues can get about a simple issue of referencing.

Aside from losing place of publication for books, there isn't really a problem here. We reference so that sources can be found. A hyperlink does not convey a connection to authors, timing of the source, location in a particular journal. All of this remains very much worth holding on to.