Harvard Reference Style

Harvard reference list

The purpose of a reference list is to enable sources to be easily traced by another reader. Different types of publications require different amounts of information but there are certain common elements such as authorship, year of publication and title, which should be included.

All items in the reference list should be listed alphabetically by author or authorship, regardless of the format, whether books, websites or journal articles etc. Where there are several works from one author or source they should by listed together, in date order, with the earliest work listed first.

Authors in the reference list

• Always start with the surname first, then initials, e.g. Smith, P.G.
• Use initials for authors’ names, even if they appear in full in the published source
• Use commas to separate authors; use an ampersand (&) before the last author, e.g. Henderson, R.S., Smith, P.G. & King, P.Q. 
• Where there is more than one work by one author and they have been published in the same year they should be differentiated by adding a lower case letter after the date, e.g. 2018a
• Note that the full name is the preferred format for corporate authors in the reference list

Titles in the reference list

• Italicize the following titles: title of book, journal title
•  If there is no author the title moves to the author position before the date of the publication
• The subtitle: a colon after the title, space and then the subtitle that starts with a lower-case letter

Non-routine information in titles

If additional information is necessary for identification and retrieval of a reference, it may be included in brackets immediately after the title. Choose wording that is brief, accurate, and descriptive of the source.

Examples:  [Blog], [Brochure], [Facebook],  [Lecture notes],  [Motion picture],  [Television series],  [Video file]

Place of Publisher

Place of publisher needs to be name of the city and not country
•        For locations in USA, you should always list the city and the state using the two letter postal

         abbreviation without periods, e.g. Hoboken, NJ
•        If you cannot locate publisher location, replace this missing information with the following: [s.l.]
•        For works with both no place and publisher, the format is: [s.l., s.n.]

Name of publisher

Give the name of the publisher in as brief form as is intelligible. Write out the names of associations, corporations and university presses, but omit superfluous terms, such as Publishers, Co., and Inc. which are not required to identify the publisher. Retain the words Books and Press

•        When the corporate author and publisher are identical, use the word “Author” as the publisher

•        If there are no named publisher, replace this missing information with the following: [s.n.]

•        For works with both no place and publisher, the format is: [s.l., s.n.]

Publication date

• Give the year the work was published (for unpublished or informally published works, give the year the  work was produced) followed by a full stop
• If no date is available, use n.d.

Online resources

DOI = is a digital object identifier, a unique, permanent identification number that will take you straight to a document no matter where it is located on the Internet

• Provide the DOI, if one has been assigned to the content. Publishers who follow best practices publish the DOI prominently on the first page of an article. Provide the alphanumeric string for the DOI exactly as published in the article. This is not a style issue, but a retrieval issue
• When a DOI is used, no further retrieval information is needed to identify or locate the content.
• If no DOI has been assigned to the content, provide the home page URL of the journal or the book. If you are accessing the article from a private database, you may need to do a quick web search to locate this URL.
•  In general, it is not necessary to include database information. Journal coverage in a particular database may change over time.
•  Include a retrieval date in square brackets after the URL.