Harvard referencing
How to cite a patent in Harvard referencing
Patents use official patent office country codes, filing vs issue dates, and unique patent numbers.
THE FORMAT
A patent in Harvard, at a glance
Inventor, A. (Year) Title of invention. Patent Office Patent No. xxxxxxx.
Dyson, J. (2021) Dual cyclone vacuum separation apparatus. UK Intellectual Property Office Patent No. GB2489123.
(Dyson, 2021)
In prose: Dyson (2021) patented the cyclone separator assembly.
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 patent
Elements to collect
- Inventor or inventors
- Year of patent issue
- Title of the invention
- Patent office (e.g., US Patent Office, European Patent Office)
- Patent number (e.g., U.S. Patent No. 10,945,678)
- URL or database source
Rules specific to this entry
- State the patent office and number after the title.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element Harvard needs for a patent: Inventor or inventors; Year of patent issue; Title of the invention; Patent office (e.g., US Patent Office, European Patent Office).
Build the reference list entry
Arrange those details in the Harvard order: Inventor, A. (Year) Title of invention. Patent Office Patent No. xxxxxxx.
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Dyson, 2021) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Dyson (2021) patented the cyclone separator assembly..
Check it against the exceptions
State the patent office and number 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 patent in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about Harvard and patents
What if the patent 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 patent?
Inventor or inventors, Year of patent issue, Title of the invention, and the rest of the elements listed above. Patents use official patent office country codes, filing vs issue dates, and unique patent numbers.
Is there anything unusual about a patent in Harvard?
State the patent office and number after the title.
Can I reformat this patent 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.
Deterministic Verification in Modern Academic Writing
Copyeditor eliminates fragmented tab-switching by unifying structured drafting, multi-style citation generation, academic tone refinement, and cryptographic process verification in one workspace.
The author approves every single sentence. Intelligent scaffolding assists with section outlines and literature integration without ghostwriting.
