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Note:
I am talking about Referencing formats and not styles (using <sub> and the like mentioned in Should we decide on a general formatting style for references?.

Looking at How should references to journal articles be provided? it seems that the preferred format is APA referencing. Before I came here, although I was familiar with others, I only knew the Harvard Referencing system.

The 2 formats are similar

Harvard

Cuijpers, P. et al., 2016. How effective are cognitive behavior therapies for major depression and anxiety disorders? A meta-analytic update of the evidence. World Psychiatry, 15(3), pp. 245—258.

APA

Cuijpers, P. et al. (2016). How effective are cognitive behavior therapies for major depression and anxiety disorders? A meta-analytic update of the evidence. World Psychiatry, 15(3), 245—258.

there are slight differences and I am now also used to writing APA references whilst answering questions here, but it took a while for me to naturally form citations in APA format.

Whilst the MLA, Chicago and Vancouver formats are very different and hard to pick out when looking for specific references in comparison to Harvard and APA

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would it be considered wrong to use a different referencing format, so long as the citation contains enough information to find the article, book etc.?

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    "would it be considered wrong to use a different referencing format" I don't see a reason to be so strict; APA is mostly just a recommendation. We have not gone on editing sprees yet to change everything to a singular format; neither do I see a need to. When editing an answer either way one could consider also modifying the format.
    – Steven Jeuris Mod
    Mar 6, 2018 at 12:33

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For the reason mentioned that formats such as MLA, Chicago, Vancouver and IEEE are very different, I think that as long as the reference contains the Author (or movie director) and the year of publication at the front, any referencing format is suitable as long as it contains all the information needed to find the article, book etc. This way, the reference will be easier to pick out, especially when there are multiple references containing the same leading author.

If following a similar format to IEEE, for example

[1] J. U. Duncombe, "Infrared navigation - Part I: An assessment of feasability," IEEE Trans. Electron. Devices, vol. ED-11, pp. 34-39, Jan. 1959.

even though the [1] will be within the main body of the posting with or without a <sup>), the author and year of publication should still be at the front changing the IEEE reference above to

[1] J. U. Duncombe (1959) "Infrared navigation - Part I: An assessment of feasability," IEEE Trans. Electron. Devices, vol. ED-11, pp. 34-39

Be careful with this formatting though

As you will see if you was to click edit at the bottom of this answer, you will have to "escape" the square bracket at the beginning if you have links within the posting which are not inline links i.e. you would need to type \[1] instead of [1]

I would suggest that if using this format, you should always escape the first square bracket to prevent issues.

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