A Quick Guide to Harvard Referencing | Citation Examples
A Quick Guide to Harvard Referencing | Citation Examples
Published on 14 February 2020 by Jack Caulfield. Revised on 15 September 2023.
Referencing is an important part of academic writing. It tells your readers what sources you’ve used and how to find them.
Harvard is the most common referencing style used in UK universities. In Harvard style, the author and year are cited in-text, and full details of the source are given in a reference list.
In-text citation
Referencing is an essential academic skill (Pears and Shields, 2019).
Reference list entry
Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2019) Cite them right: The essential referencing guide. 11th edn. London: MacMillan.
To automatically generate accurate Harvard references, you can use Scribbr’s free reference generator:
NoteSome universities publish their own guidelines for Harvard referencing – always check if there are specific rules you’re expected to follow. This quick guide presents the most common rules.
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A Harvard in-text citation appears in brackets beside any quotation or paraphrase of a source. It gives the last name of the author(s) and the year of publication, as well as a page number or range locating the passage referenced, if applicable:
The novel begins with the grim image of the train passengers’ faces, which are described as ‘pale yellow, the colour of the fog’ (Dostoyevsky, 2004, p. 5).
Note that ‘p.’ is used for a single page, ‘pp.’ for multiple pages (e.g. ‘pp. 1–5’).
An in-text citation usually appears immediately after the quotation or paraphrase in question. It may also appear at the end of the relevant sentence, as long as it’s clear what it refers to.
When your sentence already mentions the name of the author, it should not be repeated in the citation:
Woolf introduces the essay’s topic as ‘women and fiction’ (2000, p. 5), going on to discuss the various connotations of the phrase.
Sources with multiple authors
When you cite a source with up to three authors, cite all authors’ names. For four or more authors, list only the first name, followed by ‘et al.’:
Number of authors
In-text citation example
1 author
(Davis, 2019)
2 authors
(Davis and Barrett, 2019)
3 authors
(Davis, Barrett and McLachlan, 2019)
4+ authors
(Davis et al., 2019)
Sources with no page numbers
Some sources, such as websites, often don’t have page numbers. If the source is a short text, you can simply leave out the page number. With longer sources, you can use an alternate locator such as a subheading or paragraph number if you need to specify where to find the quote:
(Scribbr, para. 4)
Multiple citations at the same point
When you need multiple citations to appear at the same point in your text – for example, when you refer to several sources with one phrase – you can present them in the same set of brackets, separated by semicolons. List them in order of publication date:
Several in-depth studies have investigated this phenomenon during the last decade (Singh, 2011; Davidson, 2015; Harding, 2018).
Multiple sources with the same author and date
If you cite multiple sources by the same author which were published in the same year, it’s important to distinguish between them in your citations. To do this, insert an ‘a’ after the year in the first one you reference, a ‘b’ in the second, and so on:
The results of the first study (Woodhouse, 2018a) were inconclusive, but a follow up study (Woodhouse, 2018b) achieved a clearer outcome.
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Creating a Harvard reference list
A bibliography or reference list appears at the end of your text. It lists all your sources in alphabetical order by the author’s last name, giving complete information so that the reader can look them up if necessary.
The reference entry starts with the author’s last name followed by initial(s). Only the first word of the title is capitalised (as well as any proper nouns).
Harvard reference list example
Number of authors
Reference example
1 author
Davis, V. (2019) …
2 authors
Davis, V. and Barrett, M. (2019) …
3 authors
Davis, V., Barrett, M. and McLachlan, F. (2019) …
4+ authors
Davis, V. et al. (2019) …
Harvard referencing examples
Reference list entries vary according to source type, since different information is relevant for different sources. Formats and examples for the most commonly used source types are given below.
Author surname, initial. (Year) Page title. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Example
Google (2019) Google terms of service. Available at: https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US (Accessed: 27 January 2020).
Notes
Reference list entries for pages without a clearly identified author can begin with the name of the relevant site or organisation instead.
Referencing sources with no author or date
Sometimes you won’t have all the information you need for a reference. This section covers what to do when a source lacks a publication date or named author.
No publication date
When a source doesn’t have a clear publication date – for example, a constantly updated reference source like Wikipedia or an obscure historical document which can’t be accurately dated – you can replace it with the words ‘no date’:
In-text citation
(Scribbr, no date)
Reference list entry
Scribbr (no date) How to structure a dissertation. Available at: https://www.scribbr.co.uk/category/thesis-dissertation/ (Accessed: 14 February 2020).
Note that when you do this with an online source, you should still include an access date, as in the example.
No author
When a source lacks a clearly identified author, there’s often an appropriate corporate source – the organisation responsible for the source – whom you can credit as author instead, as in the Google and Wikipedia examples above.
When that’s not the case, you can just replace it with the title of the source in both the in-text citation and the reference list:
In-text citation
(‘Divest’, no date)
Reference list entry
‘Divest’ (no date) Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/divest (Accessed: 27 January 2020).
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Frequently asked questions about Harvard referencing
If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.
Caulfield, J. (2023, September 15). A Quick Guide to Harvard Referencing | Citation Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 18 September 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/referencing/harvard-style/
Jack is a Brit based in Amsterdam, with an MA in comparative literature. He writes for Scribbr about his specialist topics: grammar, linguistics, citations, and plagiarism. In his spare time, he reads a lot of books.
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A printable copy of the complete referencing guide is available
Referencing Video Tutorials
Closed Captions
4 min, 31 s
Why we need to reference, introduction to quotation, paraphrase and summary, the two parts of Harvard: the citation and the full reference.
Closed Captions
Transcript
2 min, 22 s
Citations need to appear in brackets, in your writing, to follow quotations and paraphrases. Here we show you what you should put in the brackets
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Closed Captions
Illustrated Transcript
3 min, 51 s
Worked example of creating a full reference for a journal article.
Closed Captions
Illustrated Transcript
2 min, 6 s
A worked example of creating a full reference for a book.
 100vw, 651px” data-lazy-src=”https://www.scribbr.co.uk/wp-content/uploads//2020/02/harvard-reference-list-example.png”></figure><h3>Sources with multiple authors in the reference list</h3><p>As with in-text citations, up to three authors should be listed; when there are four or more, list only the first author followed by ‘<em>et al.</em>’:</p><div class=)
