OU referencing help needed

[TheSweetestHalleluja]

Hi, does anyone have any advice on how to keep references ordered for writing assignments? The thing I'm struggling most is if I am referencing the same author multiple times for example Adams 2021a, Adams 2021b when referencing specific sections etc we've been asked to reference this way but I find myself getting muddled especially when editing as I might cut and paste a section and then my references are out of order, suddenly I am referencing Adams 2021b before Adams 2021a and I have to manually change them all including in my reference list...

Does that make any sense? There's got to be a better way, I just don't know what it is!

Any help much appreciated!

I think you've misunderstood how the a, b, c etc. work. It's not in order of citation in your text, it's in order alphabetically.

If you have 3 Adam (2021) refs to cite, you first need to order them alphabetically and then apply the a/b/c in order.

Adam (2021a) Alphabets and budgets etc...

Adam (2021b) Budgets and alphabets etc...

Adam (2021c) Costs of letters etc...

The order you cite them in your text is irrelevant.

Do you use reference management software? They'll help you cut out a lot of the faffy nonsense: https://www5.open.ac.uk/library/referencing-and-plagiarism/bibliographic-management

And like the previous poster said, the a,b,c etc are there to distinguish references with the same author and year, not to put them in a specific order in the text of your assignment.

OU Library Services are really good - might be worth setting up an appointment with them directly to iron out any other issues.

I'm not sure about that, the module reference guide says they are determined by the order of use in the essay itself, perhaps it varies between modules?
I've not been using any software, doing them all manually so far, so I will look into that thank you!

Does it not mean that the letter after each reference is determined by its initial location in your assignment? So the one you cite first will be a, then b, then c INITIALLY, but if you cite them after that, you don't need to somehow reorder them.

If you use referencing software that connects to your word processing software, it should do this automatically for you when you move references around.

Yes, I think I just confused myself because I had initially decided an order and assigned the letters in the original order I used them, but then when editing I have changed the order I introduce the references so had to manually re-assign the letters to match the new order. So what I had originally assigned to Adams (2021a) might now have become Adams(2021b) and vice versa so I have to go through changing my in text citations to match the new order.

I think I definitely need to look into the software as that would be amazing if it can do that automatically for me!
I know there must be a better way especially as the word count increases and the number of references needed gets bigger.

Have a look at Zotero. It’s free and very easy to use. I used it all the time for my OU studies!

I will do, thank you @CasaCoton

I don’t use software because when I first looked into it all the free options didn’t handle enough refs, but I do number them in square brackets and then delete the numbers at the final edit and add in the letters then, if that makes sense? It also makes it easy to cross-check against the ref list (with accompanying numbers) in case I end up deleting any.
So e.g as i write I have “after this by Jones 2019[1] argues blah blah versus something else (Jones 2019[2]) and then even more stuff (Jones 2019[3])”
Later maybe I decide to change the order of the sentence during editing, it’s still easy cos even if [3] ends up before [2] then it doesn’t matter as I don’t add in a, b, c until the final tidy up pre-submission. Then, once letters are added, I just search and delete anything in square brackets
Hope that helps and doesn’t confuse things further. It’s worked for me for 6 years!

Thank you @sinamordetrabajo