Harvard Referencing

Harvard Referencing

Harvard referencing uses the author and the date of the work in the main body of

the text, and then has a reference list at the end of the essay which contains the

references cited in alphabetical order by author. The reference list contains the full

details of the book or journal cited. Because you only refer to a shortened form of

works in the main essay (author, date) your essay doesn’t get filled with too much

reference material. The use of the author/date shorthand does make it easy to locate

works in the reference list. Other referencing systems use superscript numbers to

refer to footnotes but these can become overcomplicated as the number of footnotes

rises, and the chance of misnumbering occurs.

An example from the main body of a text:

Within the last ten years, teachers who have attended INSET courses have reported

that the courses have helped to increase their competence and confidence in using IT

(1993; 1990), yet despite the fact that

the passing years have presented opportunities for more teachers to increase their

skills in IT, weaknesses identified by  (1992) seem to be still evident (

1998; 1997). This suggests that we need to look for explanations other

than attendance at INSET courses for the reasons for the apparently poor state of

teachers’ competence and confidence in IT.

In this text the author is citing entire works by other researchers to support her

argument. Notice the use of brackets and the author/s and dates of all works.

Another example from the main body of a text:

One resource provided in the secondary speech genre is the “posited author”

(1981, p. 312).

Here the quotation is a direct one so a page number has been added.

Quotations of no more than two sentences can be incorporated into the main text

and marked off with quotation marks, but if you quote a longer passage it must be

placed in a separate paragraph and indented from the left and right margins of the

main text.

Reference lists

All references used in the main body of assignment need including in the reference

list. This is arranged in alphabetical order by author surname. Books, journals and

other media are all included in the same list, do not start separate lists for books and

journals, it will confuse your reader.

Books

Books are listed by author, date, title, place of publication, publisher:

 (1988) Cognition in Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The title of the book is either underlined or placed in italics, whichever style you use

you should stick to it for all references. When the books has more than one author

then list them in order they appear on the book, if it has more than 3 then the

abbreviation et. al. (and others) can be used. If an author has published more than

book or journal in a year then mark each one with an a,b,c etc. after the date. For

example ( 1989a). Make sure the reference in the body of the text

corresponds to the one in the reference list at the end of your work.

Journals

Journals are listed by author, date, title of article, title of journal, part number, page

numbers (beginning of article – end of article

 (1991) ‘Towards a pedagogy for information technology’,

The Curriculum Journal, 2, 2 153-70.

The title of the journal is underlined or italicised because someone searching for the

article in a library will first need to find the journal. The page numbers help to locate

the article quickly.

Chapters in edited books

When you need to quote from a chapter in an edited book you need to follow this

form. In your main text you quote the author of the chapter (not the editor/s of the

book) and the date of the book. In the reference list you quote the author and date

of the chapter first, and follow it with a reference to the book. In the following

example, the chapter by Schlegoff has been quoted, so ( 1972) or a

variant would appear in the main text, followed by this in the reference section.

 (1972) Notes on a conversational practice: Formulating place. In D.

 Studies in Social Interaction (). New York: Free Press.

Note the use of page numbers to identify the chapter – as in journal citation.

Electronic Information

The key to referencing a CD-ROM or website is similar to a book or journal – you

need to know the author, date and title. For web pages you must include the full

address of the page, not just the address of the site. This can be copied from the

address bar which normally appears at the top of the browser.

(1999) Online study skills guide,

 16/9/99.

An extra date, the date you accessed the page is included at the end of the reference,

because webpages, unlike books, can be modified and even disappear entirely. To

reference material on a CD-ROM use this format:

 (1997) A Guide to Icelandic Literature, CD-ROM, London: Placebo

Publishers.

If you cannot find the date of a web page then mark it as “date unknown”. If you

cannot find a named author of an electronic source then either use the organisation

in place of the author (e.g. BBC) or mark it as “author unknown”.

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