A common referencing style, Harvard Referencing is the referencing style of choice for most institutions and lecturers and is used commonly across many disciplines. Harvard Referencing contains both an intext reference as well as a fuller bibliographical entry at the end of the essay. Follow this guide to set your references out correctly.
Citing Book(s)
At the end of the sentence where you have cited something, before you place the full stop open brackets, list the authors’ surname, place a comma, list the year of publication, place a colon, list the page number where you found it from and close the brackets and place the full stop, as follows: (Bodkins, 2012: p. 22). A variation on this may be “Bodkins (2012, p. 22) states that…” On some occasions you can omit the page numbers if you’re referring to the source as a whole.
In the bibliography, list the surname followed by one initial and a full stop, place the date of publication followed by another full stop then insert the title of the book in italics, following this with a full stop and then the location of the publishers and their name, like this:
Bodkins P. 2012. How To Reference Correctly. London: Fictitious Publishing.
Page numbers are not used in the bibliography for books, but are included to show the page ranges of a journal article.
When using sources with more than one author, list up to four author’s names but any more than this just list the first author followed by et al (to denote and others).
Citing Journal Articles and Newspapers
Similar to citing books, the main difference is the title of the article is not placed in italics, but its source is. Additionally, the edition is also included, or the volume number followed by the issue or part number in brackets, followed by the page number. For example:
Bodkins P. 2012. How to Reference Correctly. Ficticious Journals Quarterly, 10 (2), p. 123.
This information would then be repeated in the bibliography except the page numbers of the entire article would be included at the end of your essay.
Bodkins P. 2012. How to Reference Correctly. Ficticious Journals Quarterly, 10 (2), pp. 123-130.
Note that when more than one page is cited, the “p.’ becomes “pp.’ to show this.
Citing Web-based Sources
There are a range of web-based sources you may draw on and there can be many ways to reference these, depending on the type of web-based source. Within the essay it is often enough just to list the name of the source and year (BBC News, 2012) providing more information in your bibliography. Here you will list the name of the website, its year of publication and its title or the title of the source concerned followed by the word online in brackets. This is followed by the source’s URL and the date you accessed it, also in brackets.
BBC News, 2012. Students Muck Up Referencing. (online) Available at: <www.bbcnews.co.uk/article12345>. (Accessed 1st February 2012).
If ever unsure how to reference a type of source, check out your own institution for guidance, see your lecturer directly or browse the internet. A good source for referencing using the Harvard System is available from https://www.librarydevelopment.group.shef.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.html
In addition, remember that your bibliography should be in alphabetical order and that sloppy referencing may be interpreted as an attempt to plagiarise someone els
For a more comprehensive overview of Harvard, please download the Harvard referencing guide PDF.
