Harvard Referencing

Referencing is an important part of creating any piece of academic writing: it informs your reader about the sources you have used, and where you have found them. If you need to write an academic paper, then one of the key decisions you will need to make quite early on is which kind of referencing system you will use. The two main ways to reference your academic document are to put your source citations in footnotes or place them in short references right after the quote.

Harvard referencing is a referencing system that is often used in academia and is the first of these referencing approaches. It is a popular system, but is it the right system for you? Here’s everything you need to know about Harvard referencing, including how to create a Harvard reference list and how to use in-text citations:

What is Harvard referencing?

‘Harvard referencing’ is an umbrella term that is used to describe any referencing style that uses the author’s name followed by the year of publication within the text itself to indicate where you have inserted a source, rather than placing your references at the end of the text.  It is also sometimes referred to as the ‘author date’ system.

Referencing in the Harvard style is a two-part system, and it is essential that both elements of this system are included for your referencing to be completed correctly. These two elements are:

• In-text citation. Following a quotation or paraphrased content from an external source within your work, you should indicate the name of the author, the date that the text was produced and the page that the quotation was taken from, in parentheses after the quotation and in that order
• Reference list. At the end of your report or research paper, you should include a complete list of all of the references cited within your work. This is sometimes referred to as a bibliography, as some universities will use these two terms interchangeably. Your reference list should include full bibliographic details of every cited reference within your text, to allow the reader to follow up on these references and find the original texts with ease, should they wish to

When was it created?

As the name strongly implies, Harvard references were first introduced at Harvard University. The system was first used by a professor of zoology named Edward Laurens Mark at the University in the 1880s and it was adopted widely throughout the university from this point. The name for the system ‘The Harvard Reference System’ was coined in 1945 by a visitor to the university who was impressed by the system and the ease that it lent to researching cited references.

Whilst people often assume that Harvard referencing is a standardised system, the reality is that many universities publish their own guidelines for how and when Harvard referencing should be used. This means that you should always check with your university if there are specific rules you’re expected to follow, rather than simply follow generic guidelines.

In-text citations

In-text citations are what the Harvard referencing system is most well-known for. In this system, the citation for any quotation or other source material is included in brackets immediately after it. When you are creating in-text citations you should always format this in the following way: the last name of the author appears first, the year of publication of the material immediately follows, and finally the page number or range of page numbers for the quotation that you have used to complete the citation.

An example of this would be ‘The earth is round’ (Smith, 2010, p.6). If the quotation or material that you are using spans over more than one page or several pages then you would indicate this by replacing the p. with pp. So in our example, if a longer quote was used then the reference would be ‘The earth is round, rather than flat’ (Smith, 2010, pp.6-7).

In-text citations almost always appear immediately after the quotation or paraphrased material that you have used in your paper or document. If you are paraphrasing a quotation within a longer sentence or paragraph then it is possible to place your in-text citation at the end of this, but only if it is abundantly clear with the quotation the in-text citation is referring to. If you have already mentioned the author within the context of the sentence that contains the quote then their name should be omitted from your citation. For example: Smith shares that the earth is flat (2010, p.6).

Creating in-text citations for sources from a single author, as outlined above, is fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, many academic research papers are created by multiple authors, and creating in-text citations for sources with multiple authors is a little more complicated. When you are citing a source with up to three authors, you should use all of their names within your in-text citation (for example, Smith, Brown and Jones, 2019, p.6). But if you are citing a source which has four or more authors then, in order to avoid convoluting your text, you only list the name of the lead researcher, or the first person listed on the research paper, followed by the Latin term ‘et al’, which simply means ‘and others’.

Thanks to the age of the internet, it is increasingly common to wish to cite online sources or other sources which do not have page numbers. If this is the case then you can omit the page number but, if the online text you wish to cite is particularly lengthy then, for the ease of your reader, you may want to find an alternative locator tool that they can use to find the quote in question. (Wikipedia, para. 5) is a good example of this.

A final point on the subject of in-text citations is that their primary purpose is to make life easier for your readers. So if you are citing multiple sources by the same author which were published in the same year, then to avoid any confusion amongst your readers you can simply distinguish between them within your citations system by using a letter organisation system. The first text you mention would be ‘Smith, 2010a’, the second would be ‘Smith, 2010b’ and so on.

Creating a Harvard reference list

Sometimes also referred to as a bibliography, a reference list is a comprehensive list of source materials that appears at the end of a research paper, report, or other text. Under the Harvard reference system, the reference list should list all of your sources in alphabetical order, rather than in the order that they appear. The author’s name should always appear first (and it is this that should be alphabetised), and the information of the book, research paper or website should be complete so that any interested reader can easily look up, and follow up on, your research material.

When creating an alphabetised Harvard reference list, the entry should start with the author’s last name and then their initial or initials. The title of the book or research paper appears next, but only the first word of the title and any proper nouns should appear capitalised. In just the same way as in your in-text citations, if you have referenced any papers written by more than one author and need to include these within your reference list then any texts with up to three authors should be listed by their name, but when there are four or more authors of a text you should list only the first author followed by ‘et al.’. Reference list entries vary according to source type, since different information is relevant for different sources. When citing a book, you should always include its publisher, for example, whilst publisher information can be omitted if you are citing a website.

Quoting

Almost all research papers or academic papers will use quoting as a valuable source of material and information. Quoting is defined as taking a section or a source and citing it within your own work using exactly the same words as the original author. This is often referred to as quoting directly from the source; it ensures that your original source material is not taken out of context and enables you to analyse it more fully. When you quote a source directly from the original source material, you should always include the page number in your reference so that your readers can easily find the text you are referring to. If you are only including a short quote then you can include this in the body of your text by using quotation marks, whilst if the quote is longer than two lines then it should be presented in its own separate paragraph.

You may wish to quote a source verbatim, but not use all of the material from the original source; perhaps because the original quote is too long or sections of it are not relevant to your own research. It is possible to omit materials from an original source, to do so you should simply use three dots […] to indicate this, with the dots appearing between the two sections of quoted text to clearly indicate that some interim text has been omitted. This omission does not need to happen at the beginning or end of a sentence, rather you can choose to interrupt the text to create the quotation that works best for you.

Paraphrasing

Unlike quotations, which copy the original source material word for word, paraphrasing is the act of putting the thoughts or ideas of someone else into your own words whilst still ensuring that you give that source the credit for the original source material. When you paraphrase a concept it is not enough to simply rearrange the sentence structure of the original author; if you do this then you should instead present it as a quotation. Rather, paraphrasing involves presenting the idea or concept in an original way and in your own words, so that it adds strength or definition to your own argument or your own research. When you are paraphrasing someone else’s work, it should still be cited and referenced clearly, to ensure that you are not accused of plagiarising someone else’s original concepts or ideas.

Standard references and footnotes

Regardless of the type of referencing system you prefer, or the type of referencing system you are advised to use by your university or online learning organisation, it is important to remember that all reference systems have the same common goal: to ensure that the reader can find all of the sources that you cite and check whether your quotes are true to the original quotes, or to read around them and give them context if they are unfamiliar with the original text.

Whilst Harvard referencing is a popular system, other referencing systems that you should be familiar with are the standard reference systems and the footnotes referencing systems. Some people prefer the footnote system because it does not interrupt the flow of the text in the same way as the Harvard reference system. Footnotes are, as the name suggests, reference information that is placed at the foot (or bottom) of the page rather than within the body of the page itself. When using the footnote referencing system you indicate a reference has been made by putting a small number above the line of type directly following the source material. Some people dislike this system because it makes it more difficult or convoluted to find the references, preferring the information to be next to the quotation or paraphrased material, so that they can cross-check it with ease. There is no right or wrong answer; often it is simply a case of personal preference, and some subjects are better suited to some reference systems than others.