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The Harvard referencing system is widely used in UK universities. The Harvard referencing style uses an author-date system. The sources are cited by providing the surname of the author and the year of publication in brackets.
1. Harvard in-text citation examples
In the following example, we are stating that the most effective approach to treat obesity is to cut food intake. This idea comes from a paper authored by John Smith published in the year 2003. There are two ways you can cite the paper in Harvard referencing style. You can either cite after the information or integrate it into the sentence.
✔ Citation at the end of the information. Both surname and year within brackets.
The simple and more effective approach to treating obesity is cutting food intake (Smith, 2003).
✔ Citation integrated into the text. Surname outside the bracket and year within brackets.
Smith (2003) proposed a simple approach to cutting food intake to treat obesity.
2. Citing multiple authors
If the source has two authors then you can specify the surnames of both authors followed by the year of publication. The same format applies to three authors. If the source has four or more authors then you have to use the surname of the first author followed by ‘et al’, which stands for ‘and all’.
| Single author | The simple and more effective approach to treating obesity is cutting food intake (Smith, 2003) |
| Two authors | The simple and more effective approach to treating obesity is cutting food intake (Smith and Jones, 2003) |
| Three authors | The simple and more effective approach to treating obesity is cutting food intake (Smith, Jones and Williams, 2003) |
| Four or more authors | The simple and more effective approach to treating obesity is cutting food intake (Smith et al., 2003) |
3. Multiple sources at the same point
If you want to cite multiple sources at the same point, you simply have to separate them with a semicolon.
✔ Multiple sources separated by semicolon
Obesity is a global pandemic with over one-third of the world’s population being classified as overweight (Brown, 2018; Walker et al., 2013; Martin and Jones, 1998).
4. Multiple sources from the same author and year
If you are dealing with multiple papers published by the same author in the same year, then you can differentiate them by using adding alphabets after the year. In the following example, you can see that we have three publications from the same author published in the same year. We have differentiated the sources by adding the letters, ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’.
✔ Sources from the same author from the same year differentiated using alphabets
The research proves that students use generative AI in more than 90% of their assignments (Jones, 2014a; Jones, 2014b; Jones, 2014c).
5. Direct quotes from sources
If you are making a direct quote from a paper, you must include the page number while citing the source. In the following example, we have used unaltered text from a paper, and hence while citing the paper we have included the page number. Please note that ‘p’ is used for a single page and ‘pp.’ is used for multiple pages.
✔ Direct quote from a paper – page number(p) mentioned in the citation
“More than 70% of papers rejected by scientific journals are written by non-native English speakers” (Wilson et al., 2020, p. 23)
✔ Direct quote from a paper – page numbers(pp) mentioned in the citation
“More than 70% of papers rejected by scientific journals are written by non-native English speakers” (Wilson et al., 2020, pp. 23-25)
6. Reference list
You must include a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text. You must list all sources in the reference list and it should be arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name.
Example below shows a list of references formatted in Harvard style. The following reference list includes a journal, a book, a website, and a conference proceeding. If you use a good citation tool, the reference list will be automatically generated for you. If you choose to format the references manually, please read this blog, you will find formatting rules for various sources.
7. Summary
If you have any questions, please drop a comment below, and we will answer as soon as possible. We also recommend you to refer to our other blogs on academic writing tools, academic writing resources, academic writing phrases, research paper examples and research paper writing tips which are relevant to the topic discussed in this blog.
