How to Harvard Reference (and avoid the most common mistakes)
Harvard Referencing is an essential skill to master when it comes to enrolling onto a higher education course, whether that’s in a university setting or online. As one of the most commonly used referencing styles along with MLA, APA and MHRA, chances are you will need to use Harvard referencing at some point in your work. Please note that as a ‘style’ rather than a hard and fast system of rules, some schools may have different requirements when it comes to their accepted versions of Harvard referencing. Use this guide as a basis, but always check with your training provider as to the specifics they may prefer.
Here are the five most commonly made mistakes while using Harvard referencing, and how you can avoid them.
One major thing you must remember to include in Harvard Referencing (as you should in most referencing styles) is to include page numbers. When referencing a book, it must be clear where your text has come from—it just isn’t possible for an assessor to skim a whole book to find your quote! You need to be clear about where exactly your information has come from so that anyone checking your work can find it easily.
Obviously when it comes to websites, audio or visual sources, it’s not possible to include a page number, so different details will supplement the location of your citation. But if you’re sourcing anything that does use page numbers—a book, journal, magazine, newspaper article, etc—the standard expectation is to include a page number in your citation. You should also include the page number of the source in your reference list, because the citation in your essay needs to link to your reference list directly, and you may have taken more than one reference from the same source across different pages.
Now that you understand how to correctly cite your references, let’s try it! Below are some examples of how to reference your quotations using citations for both books and websites:
1: Enhanced Ltd (2022, pg 26) states that “Harvard referencing is an essential skill to master when it comes to enrolling onto a higher education course.”
2: “Harvard referencing is an essential skill to master when it comes to enrolling onto a higher education course.” (Enhanced Ltd, 2022)
Here’s something other common referencing systems like APA don’t have, but is essential for you to remember; in Harvard Referencing, both a reference list and bibliography need to be present at the end of your assignment.
What’s the difference, you may ask? The main difference is that your reference list contains all the sources you’ve directly referenced in your essay, including quotes you’ve used or sources you have directly referred to. Meanwhile, your bibliography should include all the sources found in your reference list, as well as any other reading you did to supplement your knowledge when researching your essay. If this round reading contributed to your knowledge but wasn’t directly referenced, you should include them only in the bibliography—if you didn’t use any sources like these, your reference list and bibliography may look identical. Still, both the reference list and bibliography should be present to show to the assessor that you were able to identify a range of relevant references from a variety of sources.
The important point here is to make sure you understand the structure of Harvard references before you use them.
This is how a source would be formatted in your reference list if you were using a book:
Author’s Name. (Date of Publication) ‘Title of the book’. Location of publication: Publication company, page number.
And how you would format a website source:
Author or web page if author is unavailable. (Year if applicable, otherwise write “No Date”) ‘Title of webpage’. Available at: web address [Accessed on: date].
Remember to include the date you accessed the website! This is in replacement of a page number and is just as important, as websites can be changed at any time and previously available information can be lost. If there is no author for the website you’re using, you can use the name of the webpage instead. However, you should make sure that whatever title you use in your citation is the same as the one you use in your reference list/bibliography, otherwise your assessor won’t be able to clearly match the citation to the source.
You should try your best to reference from both books and websites in your essay, as a varied use of different sources reflects well on your written work. In contrast to this, having directly quoted from a source without properly referencing it could result in a count of plagiarism, as well as potentially missing out on marks for your varied use of sources!
Secondary referencing is used when you want to reference a source that is quoted in something else. While primary referencing is always preferred, this isn’t always possible, especially for particularly old texts. However secondary references do need to be formatted differently to primary ones!
Let’s say I wanted to quote Kant in a book by Jane Doe from 1999. The in-text citation would look like:
(Kant, cited in Doe 1999)
or
“Kant’s main philosophy (cited in Doe 1999) was that of a universal law of behaviour—the do unto others as you would have them do unto you mentality.”
Secondary references should also be written differently in the reference list, as you need to give credit to the source you’ve used rather than the original person who said it. It should look like this:
References:
Doe, J 1999, The Golden Rule, 2nd edn, Philosophy Publishing, Berlin.
You should not include Kant in your reference list, but do include Doe (1999).
There’s no reason why you should have to commit any of this to memory—you should absolutely use a guide to help you! Your institution will probably have a standard on how to best format your referencing, but if not, there are plenty of resources online to turn to.
Most universities will have a version of Libguides you can use, and even if you don’t attend a university looking at these guides can help you understand how to reference different types of sources. There are also generators such as harvardreferencinggenerator.com or citethisforme.com that will help you output your source as it should be structured, meaning you don’t have put too much of your focus into something as small (but important) as the structure of your references.
Finally, remember to take pride in your references. Referencing well and including all the necessary information shows that you care about the topic you’re researching and have read widely to support the content of your work. If you’ve worked hard to deliver a good assignment, your references will be the best reflection of that.
Written by Katie Sessions