Harvard Referencing: Complete Guide with Examples

Harvard referencing is an author-date citation system widely used in the UK, Australia, and South Africa. If you’re at a British or Commonwealth university, there’s a good chance your assignments require Harvard style. The examples in this guide follow Cite Them Right, the most widely adopted Harvard variant and the version most UK universities point students to in their own style guides.

Cite Them Right’s 13th edition has been the current guidance since July 31, 2025. CiteTools’ Harvard converter still renders the Cite Them Right 12th Edition (Legacy) CSL, so check any 13th-edition-specific changes against your institution’s current style guide before submitting.

How Harvard Referencing Works

Harvard uses two components:

1. In-text citations – Brief references in the body of your paper: (Author Year)
2. Reference list – Full details of every source, alphabetized at the end

Unlike APA (which Harvard closely resembles), Harvard doesn’t have a single governing body. Different universities may have slightly different Harvard guidelines. Always check your institution’s handbook.

In-Text Citation Rules

One Author

(Smith, 2025)

Or with a signal phrase:

Smith (2025) argues that...

Two Authors

(Smith and Jones, 2025)

Note: Harvard typically uses “and” rather than ”&” between authors. Some institutions use ”&” – check your style guide.

Three or More Authors

(Smith et al., 2025)

Direct Quote

Include a page number:

(Smith, 2025, p. 42)

Multiple Sources

Separate with semicolons, ordered chronologically:

(Smith, 2020; Jones, 2023; Brown, 2025)

Citing a Secondary Source

When you’ve read about a study in someone else’s work rather than in the original, Harvard uses “cited in” to make that chain explicit:

Martinez (2019, cited in Johnson, 2024) found that retention improved by 40%.

Or in parenthetical form:

(Martinez, 2019, cited in Johnson, 2024)

Only the source you actually read – Johnson, 2024 in this example – gets a full reference list entry. Never create a reference list entry for a source you haven’t personally read, even when you’re quoting its findings secondhand. If you can track down the original Martinez study directly, cite that instead; a secondary source should be a last resort, not a shortcut.

Reference List Format by Source Type

Journal Article

Smith, J.D. and Johnson, M.K. (2025) ‘The impact of citation accuracy on academic publishing’, Journal of Academic Writing, 15(3), pp. 45–62. doi:10.1234/example.

Key points:

• Article title in single quotation marks (some variants use none)
• Journal title in italics
• Volume(issue) without spaces
• “pp.” before page range
• No access date needed – the DOI itself is a stable, permanently resolvable identifier (see doi.org for how DOI resolution actually works). Access dates are reserved for sources you can only locate through an ordinary URL.

Book

Brown, A. (2024) Academic Writing: A Complete Guide. 3rd edn. London: Routledge.

Key points:

• Book title in italics
• Edition noted as “3rd edn.” (not “3rd edition”)
• Place of publication followed by publisher

Edited Book Chapter

Wilson, R. (2025) ‘Citation practices across disciplines’, in S. Taylor and P. Lee (eds) Handbook of Academic Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 112–134.

Note that the editors keep their normal name order – “S. Taylor and P. Lee (eds)” – rather than being inverted the way the chapter’s own author is. Cite Them Right also drops the period from the plural abbreviation: “(eds)” for multiple editors, but “(ed.)” with a period when there’s only one. Inverting editor names in the “in ... (eds)” clause is one of the more common Harvard mistakes; only the first-listed name of the work’s own author gets inverted.

E-Books and E-Journals

An e-book with a DOI is cited exactly like a print book, with the DOI added at the end instead of the place-and-publisher pairing you’d rely on for a physical copy:

Adeyemi, F. (2023) Statistical Methods for Field Ecology. E-book. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/example-ecology.

If the e-book has no DOI – common with library-platform e-books distributed through services like ProQuest or JSTOR – add “Available at:” and an access date instead, the same fallback used for any source without a stable identifier:

Adeyemi, F. (2023) Statistical Methods for Field Ecology. E-book. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/example-ecology (Accessed: 2 April 2025).

A journal article read online rather than in a bound print issue is cited no differently from the standard journal article format above – Harvard doesn’t distinguish between print and online access once a DOI is present. Only add “Available at:” and an access date to a journal article if it comes from a source with no DOI, which is uncommon for anything indexed by a major database.

Website

World Health Organization (2025) Global health statistics 2025. Available at: https://www.who.int/statistics (Accessed: 15 March 2025).

Key points:

• “Available at:” before the URL
• “Accessed:” date in parentheses – required here specifically because a plain website has no DOI or other stable identifier to point to instead
• If this same report had been assigned a DOI, the access date would be dropped entirely, following the same rule as the journal article example above

Report

Department for Education (2025) Higher education funding review. London: HMSO.

No Author or No Date

When a source has no identifiable author, move the title into the author position, italicized if the source is a standalone work:

Global health statistics 2025 (2025) World Health Organization. Available at: https://www.who.int/statistics (Accessed: 15 March 2025).

When a source has no visible publication date, Cite Them Right uses “(no date)” in place of the year – not “n.d.,” which is the APA convention:

Ferreira, L. (no date) Coastal erosion patterns in the Bay of Bengal. Available at: https://www.example.org/coastal-erosion (Accessed: 3 April 2025).

If a source is missing both, combine the two fixes: title in the author position, “(no date)” where the year would go. For the equivalent no-author and no-date rules in APA, MLA, and Chicago, see our guide to citing a website.

Worked Example: In-Text Citations to a Full Reference List

Here’s how a paragraph’s in-text citations map onto the reference-list entries a marker actually checks. Suppose your paragraph reads:

Citation accuracy has a measurable effect on how seriously academic work is taken (Smith and Johnson, 2025). Wilson (2025) attributes much of the inconsistency to time pressure late in the writing process, a claim supported by earlier survey data (Brown, 2024, cited in Wilson, 2025). The World Health Organization (2025) reports similar patterns among health science trainees.

Three sources are named, but only two require full reference-list entries – Brown appears only as a secondary source read through Wilson’s work, so it’s Wilson’s entry that carries the DOI, not Brown’s:

Smith, J.D. and Johnson, M.K. (2025) ‘The impact of citation accuracy on academic publishing’, Journal of Academic Writing, 15(3), pp. 45–62. doi:10.1234/example.

Wilson, R. (2025) ‘Time pressure and citation consistency in undergraduate writing’, Journal of Higher Education Research, 8(2), pp. 201–215. doi:10.5678/example.

World Health Organization (2025) Global health statistics 2025. Available at: https://www.who.int/statistics (Accessed: 15 March 2025).

Notice the ordering: alphabetical by first author’s surname – Smith, then Wilson, then World Health Organization, since corporate authors alphabetize under their full organizational name – not the order the sources appear in the paragraph. This is the step students skip most often: writing entries in citation order and forgetting to resort the finished list alphabetically.

Harvard vs APA: Key Differences

Harvard and APA are similar but not interchangeable. For APA’s own current rules, APA Style is the authoritative source to check whenever you need a specific edge case confirmed:

For a broader comparison, see our APA vs MLA vs Chicago guide.

Common Mistakes

1. Mixing Harvard and APA – They look similar but have specific differences
2. Adding an access date when a DOI is present – Cite Them Right only requires one when the source has no DOI or other stable identifier to point to instead
3. Wrong quotation marks – Harvard uses single quotes for article titles (in British English)
4. Omitting place of publication – Required for books in Harvard
5. Inconsistent “and” vs ”&” – Pick one and stick with it based on your institution’s rules
6. Inverting editor names in an “in ... (eds)” clause – editors keep their normal first-name-first order; only the chapter’s own author is inverted
7. Adding a period to plural “(eds)” – Cite Them Right drops the period for multiple editors; only the singular “(ed.)” keeps one

If you need to switch between Harvard and another style, our citation converter handles it instantly. For DOIs specifically, our full DOI guide covers how to find one and how every major style formats it.

Try It with CiteTools

Paste any reference – a DOI, URL, ISBN, or messy citation – into CiteTools.io and convert it to Harvard style instantly. We handle all the formatting quirks, including the DOI-vs-access-date rule above, so you don’t have to.