author–date
Harvard referencing: how to cite anything
Harvard is not one style. It is a family of author–date conventions with no governing body, no edition number, and no official manual — which means the version your marker expects is whichever one your department or library publishes. Anglia Ruskin, Cite Them Right, the University of Melbourne, and a hundred other institutions all differ on small, gradable details: whether a comma precedes the year, whether article titles take single or double quotation marks, whether an access date is required. The examples below follow a common Harvard pattern, close to the widely taught Cite Them Right conventions; treat them as a starting point and check every entry against your own guide before you submit.
- Citation system
- author–date
- Reference list is called
- Reference list
- Common in
- Business and management, Economics, Nursing and allied health, Education, Social sciences at UK, Irish, and Australian universities, Engineering programs at some institutions
- Authority
- your institution’s Harvard style guide — Harvard has no single governing manual
- Formatted automatically by Copyeditor
- Not yet. Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE today; this guide is here regardless.
THE RULES THAT CARRY
What Harvard expects of every entry
- There is no Harvard manual, so find your local one first
- APA has a publication manual, MLA has a handbook, Chicago has The Chicago Manual of Style. Harvard has none of these. Your authority is the guide published by your department, your library, or your journal — and if two of those disagree, ask which one is being marked against.
- Author and year in the text, alphabetical list at the end
- Cite as (Marchetti, 2019) in parentheses, or as Marchetti (2019) when the author’s name is part of your sentence. Add a page number for a quotation or a specific claim: (Marchetti, 2019, p. 218). The reference list is alphabetical by author surname and is never numbered.
- Know exactly where the variants disagree
- The recurring disputes are: a comma before the year or not — (Marchetti, 2019) vs (Marchetti 2019); single vs double quotation marks on article and chapter titles; “Available at:” before a URL or a bare URL; whether an access date is required when a DOI exists; and “and” vs “&” between authors. Decide each one from your guide, then never vary.
- Italics mark the larger work
- Book, journal, report, thesis, and podcast-series titles go in italics. Article, chapter, episode, and paper titles go in quotation marks. Most Harvard guides use sentence case for the title of the work and title case for the journal or newspaper it appeared in — but a minority use title case throughout, so check.
- Same author, same year takes a letter suffix
- Two works by Halloran published in 2018 become 2018a and 2018b, in both the text and the reference list. Most guides assign the letters by alphabetical order of title; a few assign them by order of first appearance in your text. The letter has to match in both places either way.
- Online sources usually need an access date
- The typical form is “Available at: https://… (Accessed: 3 March 2024).” Nearly every Harvard guide asks for it on web pages. Guides differ on whether it is still required when the source has a DOI or a fixed publication date, which is one of the most common places two Harvard reference lists visibly diverge.
- Multiple authors: name them until your guide says stop
- A common convention names up to three authors in the text and uses “et al.” from four upward, while the reference list gives every name. Other guides switch to “et al.” from three authors, and some cap the reference list at six or twenty names. This is a per-institution rule with no default worth guessing.
BY SOURCE TYPE
Every Harvard format, one page each
Each page carries the pattern, a worked entry, both in-text forms, and the exceptions that apply to that source.
Journal article
Author, A. (Year) ‘Title of article’, Title of Journal, Volume(Issue), pp. 00–00. Available at: https://doi.org/… (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Book
Author, A. (Year) Title of book. Edition. Place of publication: Publisher.
Chapter in an edited book
Author, A. (Year) ‘Title of chapter’, in B. Editor (ed.) Title of book. Place: Publisher, pp. 00–00.
Website
Author or Organization (Year) Title of page. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Thesis or dissertation
Author, A. (Year) Title of thesis. PhD thesis. Name of institution. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Conference paper
Author, A. (Year) ‘Title of paper’, Title of Conference. Location, Day Month. Place: Publisher, pp. 00–00.
Report
Organization (Year) Title of report. Report no. 00. Place: Publisher. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Newspaper article
Author, A. (Year) ‘Headline’, Name of Newspaper, Day Month, p. 00.
YouTube video
Uploader (Year) Title of video. Day Month. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Podcast episode
Presenter, A. (Year) ‘Title of episode’, Title of podcast [Podcast]. Day Month. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Interview
Interviewee, A. (Year) Interviewed by B. Interviewer, Publication or program, Day Month. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Dataset
Creator, A. (Year) Title of dataset (Version 0.0) [Dataset]. Repository. Available at: https://doi.org/… (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Where Harvard entries usually go wrong
- Assuming the Harvard guide a friend at another university uses is the same as yours — the differences are small, visible, and marked.
- Mixing two Harvard guides in one reference list, usually by copying half the entries out of a database and formatting the rest by hand.
- Leaving the page number off a direct quotation. Almost every Harvard guide requires it, even when the year alone is enough for a paraphrase.
- Writing “et al.” in the reference list when your guide asks for every author to be named there.
- Putting the year at the end of the entry out of APA or Vancouver habit; in Harvard it belongs in parentheses immediately after the author.
- Dropping the access date from a web page when your guide requires one, or adding it to a print book where it makes no sense.
- Using “&” in the reference list and “and” in the text without checking which one the guide actually specifies.
Questions about Harvard
Does Copyeditor format Harvard references automatically?
No. Copyeditor formats APA 7th, MLA 9th, Chicago notes–bibliography, and IEEE automatically today, and Harvard variants are not among them. That is a direct consequence of the problem this page describes: there is no single Harvard to implement, and a formatter that produced one arbitrary variant would be wrong for most of the people using it. If your department accepts an alternative, APA is the closest structural relative.
Which Harvard guide should I follow?
The one your department publishes, every time. If your department has not published one, your university library almost certainly has, and that is the next best authority. If neither exists, pick one recognized guide, state in your methods or a footnote which one you followed, and apply it consistently — consistency is the part markers can actually assess.
Is Harvard the same as APA?
They are both author–date systems and they look similar at a glance, which is exactly why people get caught. They differ on punctuation, on capitalization of titles, on whether a place of publication is included, on “Available at:” and access dates, and on the ampersand. Converting between them is a real editing pass, not a find-and-replace.
What do I write when a source has no date?
Most Harvard guides use “(no date)” written out in full, in both the in-text citation and the reference list. A minority use the abbreviation “n.d.” borrowed from APA. Pick whichever your guide specifies, and if it is silent, choose one and keep it uniform across every undated source.
How do I cite a source with a lot of authors?
A common pattern names up to three authors in the text — (Okonkwo, Lindqvist and Salas, 2022) — and shortens to (Okonkwo et al., 2022) from four upward, while listing every author in the reference list. Some guides switch to “et al.” at three, and some cap the reference list. Check your guide before you build a list of long-author works, because retrofitting the rule later is tedious.
Other citation styles
Departments change their minds. Here is the rest of the set.
APA citation guide
Author–date. Used in Psychology, Education, Nursing and the health sciences.
MLA citation guide
Author–page. Used in Literature and literary studies, Languages and linguistics, Composition and rhetoric.
Chicago citation guide
Notes–bibliography. Used in History, Art history and visual culture, Literature and literary studies.
IEEE citation guide
Numeric. Used in Electrical and electronic engineering, Computer science and software engineering, Robotics, control, and systems engineering.
Vancouver citation guide
Numeric. Used in Medicine and clinical research, Nursing and allied health, Public health and epidemiology.
Stop reformatting
your reference list by hand
Cite as you write and let the bibliography build itself in APA, MLA, Chicago or IEEE. Copyeditor is in beta — apply and we’ll reach out as spots open.
