I understand the idea of giving people credit for their work, absolutely reasonable
But let’s say APA and Harvard have a different style for references is there any real advantage of one over the other and why are both so specific with formatting
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References aren’t just about giving people credit, they are also about helping your readers navigate the web of scholarship on the topic they are interested in. When someone is seriously researching the established literature, they may read an abstract, skip straight to the citations skim through the 50 or so citations, look up the most interesting 10, read those abstracts, skip to those citations, look up the interesting ones of those, and hopefully find a paper that is exactly on point for what they are looking for. Keep in mind that the same author may have published multiple papers (possibly in the same year); and there could be multiple papers with the same title; and when you are writing the paper you need to maintain your list of references. It makes everyone’s life way easier to just have a standard way of writing citations.
It would be better if everyone could agree on the same standard, but history got in our way, so now we have a couple.
In fields where tracking down references is less essential you see much looser standards around citation. For example, you almost never see APA or Harvard style references in newspapers. You’ll just see in the prose of the article a description of where it came from, hopefully with the name of the underlying article and its authors. Since an entire story in the news will have maybe 1 or 2 published sources, and most readers are not interested in reading the original source, there is far less reason to standardize on a citation format.
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