Harvard referencing: a complete guide

Harvard referencing is the most widely used citation style in the United Kingdom, and one of the most common in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The name is misleading: Harvard University does not publish a Harvard style manual and never has. The system grew out of an author-date convention developed in late nineteenth-century American science writing and acquired its name informally. The closest thing to an authoritative reference today is Pears and Shields, Cite Them Right, now in its twelfth edition, which is the book most UK universities recommend or supply through their library services.

Because there is no single manual, every UK institution publishes its own Harvard guide. The University of Leeds Harvard, the Anglia Ruskin Harvard, and the Open University Harvard all differ in small details: whether you italicise the journal title or the article title, whether you place the year in round or square brackets, whether to capitalise the title in sentence or title case. The structure described in this guide follows Cite Them Right, which sits comfortably between the most common institutional variants. Check your specific institution's Harvard guide before submitting work.

In-text citations

Harvard places the author's surname and the year of publication in parentheses inside your sentence. For a direct quotation, add a page number preceded by "p." for a single page or "pp." for a range.

The argument that working memory load drives reading comprehension (Patel and Liu, 2021) has been replicated several times.

Patel and Liu (2021, p. 723) argued that the effect was consistent across age groups.

For two authors, name both, joined by "and" in running prose and inside parentheses (Cite Them Right uses "and" rather than the ampersand favoured by APA). For three or more authors, write the first author's surname followed by "et al." in italics from the first citation: (Garcia et al., 2022). For an organisation as the author, write out the full name on first use and an abbreviation thereafter, with the abbreviation introduced in square brackets: (World Health Organization [WHO], 2022).

If you cite two different sources by the same author and year, add a lowercase letter to disambiguate, starting with "a" for the source cited first: (Smith, 2020a) and (Smith, 2020b). The letters carry over to the reference list. For a source with no date, write "no date" in lowercase rather than the APA abbreviation "n.d.": (Smith, no date).

Reference list

The reference list appears at the end of the work, headed "References" or "Reference List," alphabetised by author surname, with a hanging indent of roughly 1 cm. Line spacing is usually 1.5 or double, matching the body. The list contains only sources you actually cited in the text. A separate "Bibliography" section, if your institution asks for one, contains background reading you consulted but did not cite.

Book by one or two authors

Mantel, H. (2009) Wolf Hall. London: Fourth Estate.

Goodwin, J. and Reed, A. (2018) Reading the modernist page. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Note the round brackets around the year, the book title in italics with sentence case (only first word and proper nouns capitalised), the place of publication, a colon, and then the publisher. Cite Them Right keeps the place of publication, unlike APA 7 which dropped it. Some institutions follow APA on this point even within Harvard, so check the local guide.

Edited book chapter

Okafor, S. (2019) 'Bilingual word recognition', in Cordoba, M. and Park, T. (eds.) Handbook of psycholinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 312-340.

Chapter titles sit inside single quotation marks. The book title is italicised. Editors take the abbreviation "(eds.)" in parentheses after their names. The page range of the chapter comes at the end.

Journal article

Patel, R. and Liu, M. (2021) 'Working memory load and reading comprehension', Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(4), pp. 720-734. doi:10.1037/edu0000512.

The journal title is italicised in title case, the volume number is in italics or plain depending on the institution, the issue is in parentheses, and the DOI is written without the URL wrapper unless your tutor requires it. Several institutional Harvard guides do prefer the full URL formhttps://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000512, in which case use that.

Newspaper article (online)

Hern, A. (2024) 'What the new EU AI rules actually do', The Guardian, 12 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/12/eu-ai-act (Accessed: 4 May 2024).

Harvard requires an "Available at" prefix before the URL and an "Accessed" date in brackets at the end. This is one of the visible differences from APA 7, which has dropped these labels.

Web page

World Health Organization (2022) Mental health: strengthening our response. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health (Accessed: 4 May 2024).

Government report

Office for National Statistics (2023) Labour market overview, UK: December 2023. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket (Accessed: 4 May 2024).

Thesis or dissertation

Mancini, G. (2021) Phonological awareness in Italian-English bilinguals. PhD thesis. University College London. Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10128456 (Accessed: 4 May 2024).

Film

The Power of the Dog (2021) Directed by Jane Campion [Feature film]. Los Gatos: Netflix.

Podcast episode

Glass, I. (2022) 'The retrievals', This American Life [Podcast]. 1 April. Available at: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/765 (Accessed: 4 May 2024).

Secondary citations

When you want to cite an idea you read about in a secondary source rather than the original, Harvard uses an "in" or "cited in" construction. The in-text citation names the original author with the year you would associate with that idea, then "cited in" and the secondary source you actually read. Only the secondary source appears in your reference list.

The argument that working memory load drives reading comprehension (Smith, 1995, cited in Patel and Liu, 2021) has been tested across several decades.

Reach for the original where you can; secondary citations are an acknowledgement that you have not read the source firsthand, which weakens the authority of the claim. Tutors notice when students rely heavily on secondary citations rather than tracking down originals.

Multiple sources in one citation

To cite several sources for a single claim, separate them with semicolons inside one set of parentheses, ordered alphabetically by author surname: (Goodwin and Reed, 2018; Mantel, 2009; Patel and Liu, 2021). Some institutional Harvard guides prefer chronological ordering instead; alphabetical is more common in Cite Them Right and matches APA practice.

When citing two sources by the same author published in the same year, the lowercase letter suffix matches what appears in the reference list: (Smith, 2020a, 2020b). The letters are assigned in the order the sources appear in the reference list, alphabetised by title.

Quoting and paraphrasing

Short quotations of fewer than two or three lines fit inside your paragraph in single quotation marks (Cite Them Right uses single quotes; some institutions prefer double). Longer quotations become a block quote: a new line, indented from the left margin, no quotation marks, and the citation after the final full stop rather than before.

When you paraphrase, you still need an in-text citation. Page numbers are recommended for paraphrased ideas drawn from a specific part of a longer work, even though Harvard does not formally require them in the same way it does for quotations. Including the page reference helps your marker check the source and shows you have read closely.

Where institutions differ

The variations between UK universities are small but real. Some examples to watch for in your own institution's guide. Anglia Ruskin uses italics for book titles in sentence case, while the University of Westminster keeps sentence case for books but uses title case for journal titles. The Open University includes the issue number for journals in brackets after the volume, while a few institutions still print the issue number outside the italicised volume. Some guides put the year in square brackets rather than round brackets when an item is undated and you have inferred a year: (Smith, [2018]). The University of Bath omits the "and" between two authors in parenthetical citations and uses an ampersand instead.

None of these variations matters once you commit to one and apply it consistently. The error markers actually penalise is inconsistency, not the specific choice of bracket type. Pick a guide, follow it through, and use the same conventions across the whole document.

Common mistakes

The errors UK markers see most often are predictable. Forgetting the year on an in-text citation is the most common: writers cite (Patel) where they mean (Patel, 2021). Mixing up "et al." rules between editions is the second: modern Harvard, following Cite Them Right twelfth edition, uses "et al." from the first citation for three or more authors. Missing page numbers on direct quotations is the third. Inconsistent formatting of journal volume and issue numbers is the fourth. The fifth is omitting the access date for online sources, which Harvard still requires even when the source is dated.

What to do next

Build correctly formatted Harvard references with the Phrasit citation generator, review common citation mistakes before you submit, and check the prose around your citations with the grammar checker.