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Harvard referencing — also known as the author-date system and parenthetical system — is a format for writing and organizing citations of source materials. It was first used in 1881 in a paper by Edward Laurens Mark, professor of anatomy and director of the zoological laboratory at Harvard University, who derived it from the laboratory library's cataloguing system.

Under the Harvard referencing system, a brief citation to a source is given in the text of an article, and full citations collected in alphabetical order under a "References" or "Works Cited" heading at the end. The citation is placed in parentheses after the sentence or part of one, followed by the year of publication, as in (Author 2005), and a page number where appropriate (Author 2005, p. 1) or (Author 2005:1).

How works are cited

The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the author's surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Deane example near the top of this article.

• The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The author's surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say: Author (2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery.

• Two or three authors are cited using "and" or "&": (Author, Smith, and Jones 1991) or (Author, Smith & Jones 1991). Four or more authors are cited using et al (Author et al 1992).

• An unknown date is cited as no date (Deane n.d.). A reference to a reprint is cited with the original publication date in square brackets (Marx 1967, 90).

• If an author published two books in 2005, the year of the first (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b.

• A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block.

• Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as "Works cited" or "References." The difference between "works cited" and a bibliography is that a bibliography section may include works not cited.

• All citations are in the same font as the main text.

Examples

Examples of book references are:

• Smith, J. (2005a). Harvard Referencing, Wherever, Florida:Wikimedia Foundation. ISBN 1-899235-74-4.
• Smith, J. (2005b). More Harvard Referencing, Wherever, Florida:Wikimedia Foundation. ISBN 1-899235-74-4.

An example of a journal reference is:

• Smith, John Maynard. (1998). The origin of altruism. Nature 393: 639–40.

A newspaper article is usually cited in running text and omitted from the References section. An example of a formal newspaper reference is:

• Bowcott, O. "Protests halt online auction to shoot stag", The Guardian, October 18, 2005.

If the publication is offline:

• Bowcott, O. 2005. Protests halt online auction to shoot stag. The Guardian, October 18, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1594716,00.html.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Harvard referencing

Notes

1. "Bibliographic Format for References", based on the Chicago Manual of Style, University of Georgia, retrieved October 18, 2005.
2. "Basic structure and format of citation styles", The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, retrieved August 4, 2006.
3. The Vancouver system is another variation.
4. Mark, Edward Laurens. 1881. Maturation, fecundation, and segmentation of Limax campestris. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology vol. 6, part 2, no. 12: 173–625.
5. Chernin, Eli. "The "Harvard System: a mystery dispelled," British Medical Journal vol 297 October 22, 1988, 1062-1063.

Further reading

• MIT. 2006. "Citing sources and listing references", in The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing.

• Bibliography
• Research
• Style guides