Citing Secondary Sources with OSCOLA: An Overview

OSCOLA – short for Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities – does exactly what it says on the tin: i.e. provides a standard for citing legal authorities. As part of this, OSCOLA referencing divides authorities into primary sources (case reports and legislation) and secondary sources (pretty much everything else).

But the range of formats within this second category can make citing secondary sources with OSCOLA confusing.

So check out our guide to find out how this works.

What Are Secondary Sources?

Secondary sources in OSCOLA pretty much include anything that isn’t a legal document but that you want to cite in your work, such as:

• Books
• Edited collections
• Journal articles
• Newspaper or magazine articles
• Official documents
• Websites

So unless the document you’re citing is a case report, a statute or a statutory instrument, there’s a good chance it will be a secondary source.

General Principles

Like primary sources, you should cite secondary sources in footnotes, indicated using superscript numbers (e.g. ¹, ², ³) in the main text.

The information required in the footnote will depend on the source type, but there are some pointers worth keeping in mind for all sources:

• In citations, you will usually provide the author’s first name (or initial) and surname, a source title and relevant publication information.
• If a source has more than three authors, you only need to include the first name listed followed by ‘and others’.
• Sources without a named author should be listed with the organisation that claims editorial responsibility as the author.
• Titles of books (and all publications with an ISBN) should be italicised.
• Publications available electronically should be cited with the relevant URL.

Citing a Book in OSCOLA Referencing

To demonstrate how citing secondary sources works in OSCOLA referencing, we’ll focus on how to cite a book:

Author, | Title | (Edition, | Publisher | Year) | Pinpoint

The pinpoint here is the specific page or paragraph number being cited, while the edition only has to be specified if the source is not a first edition. In a footnote, then, we would cite a book like this:

^1. Bill O’Rights, Constitutional Protection (2^nd edn, Hodder & Fouslon 1998) 245.

You can indicate consecutive citations of the same source using ‘ibid.’ and a new page number. For non-consecutive citations of the same source, you can give the author’s surname and cross-reference it with the first note.

Bibliography

While you will list primary sources in a table of authorities in OSCOLA, you will add secondary sources to a separate bibliography. Within this, list sources alphabetically by author surname with all relevant publication information.

As with footnotes, the exact information required will depend on the source type. Usually, though, it will be similar to the first footnote, only with:

• The author’s surname given first
• Initials in place of a first name,
• No full stop

For example, we would list the source cited above as follows:

O’Rights, B, Constitutional Protection (2^nd edn, Hodder & Fouslon 1998)