Harvard referencing
How to cite a clinical trial registry in Harvard referencing
Trial registrations require official registry identifiers (NCT, EudraCT) and registration dates rather than standard publication volumes.
THE FORMAT
A clinical trial registry in Harvard, at a glance
Sponsor Name (Year) Title of clinical trial. Registry Identifier. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Oxford Vaccine Group (2023) Safety and immunogenicity of novel malaria candidate vaccine. ISRCTN Registry ISRCTN89123456. Available at: https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN89123456 (Accessed: 18 April 2024).
(Oxford Vaccine Group, 2023)
In prose: The Oxford Vaccine Group (2023) registered the phase II trial.
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the reference list builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What Harvard needs from a clinical trial registry
Elements to collect
- Sponsor or principal investigator name
- Registration year
- Title of the clinical trial
- Registry name (ClinicalTrials.gov, EU Clinical Trials)
- Registry identifier number (e.g., NCT04368728)
- URL of the trial record
Rules specific to this entry
- List the registry identifier directly after the title.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element Harvard needs for a clinical trial registry: Sponsor or principal investigator name; Registration year; Title of the clinical trial; Registry name (ClinicalTrials.gov, EU Clinical Trials).
Build the reference list entry
Arrange those details in the Harvard order: Sponsor Name (Year) Title of clinical trial. Registry Identifier. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Oxford Vaccine Group, 2023) — or work the same reference into your sentence as The Oxford Vaccine Group (2023) registered the phase II trial..
Check it against the exceptions
List the registry identifier directly after the title.
Harvard RULES
The conventions behind every Harvard entry
your institution’s Harvard style guide — Harvard has no single governing manual is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the reference list is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the reference list is sorted, and where Harvard entries most often go wrong — are collected on the Harvard referencing guide.
The same clinical trial registry in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about Harvard and clinical trial registries
What if the clinical trial registry has no author?
Move the title into the author position and alphabetize by the first significant word of that title — ignoring an initial “A”, “An” or “The”. In the text, use a shortened form of the title where the author name would go.
What do I need before I can cite a clinical trial registry?
Sponsor or principal investigator name, Registration year, Title of the clinical trial, and the rest of the elements listed above. Trial registrations require official registry identifiers (NCT, EudraCT) and registration dates rather than standard publication volumes.
Is there anything unusual about a clinical trial registry in Harvard?
List the registry identifier directly after the title.
Can I reformat this clinical trial registry in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
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