How to cite in Harvard (Cite Them Right): formats, examples, and common mistakes

Harvard is the house style of most UK universities and plenty of Australian, Irish, and European departments, and it comes with a complication the other big styles do not have: there is no official Harvard manual. 'Harvard' is a family of author-date styles, and the version most UK libraries teach is the one codified in Cite Them Right, the referencing handbook used across British higher education. This guide follows Cite Them Right conventions, because that is what your library almost certainly means when it hands you a Harvard guide, but the recurring instruction throughout is: check which Harvard you are actually being marked against.

The structure will feel familiar if you have ever seen APA: short author-date citations inside the text, one alphabetised reference list at the end, and a strict one-to-one match between the two. The differences live in the details. Harvard puts article titles in single quotation marks, writes 'and' rather than an ampersand, keeps the place of publication for books, spells out 'no date', and stamps every web source with an accessed date. Get those five habits right and most of your list follows.

Below: the in-text rules, reference formats for journal articles, books, chapters, and websites, six worked examples you can adapt, the five most common Harvard mistakes, and how to generate the citations automatically rather than hand-formatting several dozen entries the week before submission.

Harvard in-text citations: author, comma, year

A Harvard parenthetical citation is author, comma, year: (Rahman, 2021). The narrative form names the author in the sentence and brackets only the year: Rahman (2021) argues that writing groups shorten completion times. Unlike APA, Harvard uses the word 'and' between authors everywhere, including inside brackets: (Rahman and Osei, 2021). There is no ampersand anywhere in Cite Them Right Harvard.

Quotations and close paraphrases take a page number after the year: (Njoku, 2020, p. 143), or pp. 143-145 for a range. Several sources supporting one claim sit in a single set of brackets, separated by semicolons: (Njoku, 2020; Rahman and Osei, 2021). Order them consistently, either by date or alphabetically, and keep that ordering rule for the whole thesis.

When a source has no date, write exactly that: (Marsh, no date). Harvard spells it out rather than abbreviating to n.d., although some university variants accept both. Organisational authors are cited by name, (Office for Doctoral Training, 2024), and long names can be abbreviated after a first full mention if you flag the abbreviation.

Harvard rules for multiple authors, repeat years, and secondary sources

The author-count mechanics you will need most often are below. One extra warning before the list: use secondary referencing sparingly. Examiners read '(cited in)' as 'I did not read the original', which is fine for a passing mention and damaging for a source your argument depends on. If a work matters to your thesis, find and read the original.

• Two authors: cite both, joined by 'and': (Rahman and Osei, 2021).
• Three authors: cite all three: (Rahman, Osei and Lindqvist, 2021).
• Four or more authors: first author plus et al.: (Lindqvist et al., 2022).
• Same author, same year: add letters to the year in both the text and the list: (Njoku, 2020a; Njoku, 2020b).
• Secondary referencing, when you read about a source inside another source: (Vygotsky, 1978, cited in Doyle, 2016). Only Doyle appears in your reference list, because Doyle is what you actually read.

Harvard reference format for a journal article

The template: Author, A.A. (Year) 'Title of article', Journal Title, Volume(Issue), pp. first-last, followed by the DOI. The article title sits in single quotation marks with minimal capitalisation; the journal title is italicised and keeps its own capitals. Note that there is no full stop after the closing year bracket, one of the small punctuation habits that distinguishes Harvard from APA at a glance.

Worked example 1: Rahman, S. and Osei, K. (2021) 'Doctoral writing groups and completion: a mixed-methods study', Studies in Higher Education Practice, 14(3), pp. 301-318. doi: 10.1000/shep.2021.0301. Newer editions of Cite Them Right format the DOI as a full https://doi.org link instead of a 'doi:' prefix; either is defensible, but pick one form and use it for every entry.

Worked example 2, four or more authors: Lindqvist, P. et al. (2022) 'Supervision frequency and doctoral progress', Journal of Research Education, 9(1), pp. 44-61. doi: 10.1000/jre.2022.0044. Cite Them Right permits et al. in the reference list for works with four or more authors, but some universities want every author named in the list even when the in-text citation uses et al. Check your handbook once, then stay consistent.

Harvard reference format for a book or chapter

The book template keeps two elements APA dropped: the edition statement and the place of publication. Author, A.A. (Year) Title of book in italics. Edition. Place of publication: Publisher. The edition is abbreviated 'edn.' precisely to avoid confusion with 'ed.' for editor, a small distinction markers notice and generators frequently get wrong.

Worked example 3: Njoku, C. (2020) Research design for postgraduate students. 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

The chapter template: Author, A.A. (Year) 'Title of chapter', in Editor, E. (ed.) Title of book in italics. Place of publication: Publisher, pp. first-last. The chapter title takes single quotes, the book title takes italics, and the page range of the whole chapter comes last. In your text you cite the chapter author, never the editors.

Worked example 4: Almeida, R. (2019) 'Sampling in qualitative research', in Whitfield, S. and Cho, M. (eds.) The postgraduate methods handbook. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 87-104.

Harvard reference format for a website

The web template: Author or Organisation (Year) Title of page in italics. Available at: URL (Accessed: day month year). The accessed date is not optional in Harvard. Web pages change and disappear, and the accessed date tells your reader which version of the page your claim rests on. When no personal author is named, the organisation responsible for the site is the author; when there is no date anywhere on the page, use (no date) and rely on the accessed date to anchor the entry in time.

Worked example 5: Office for Doctoral Training (2024) Writing your literature review. Available at: https://www.example.org/lit-review (Accessed: 12 July 2026).

Worked example 6, no date: Marsh, T. (no date) Managing supervisor meetings. Available at: https://www.example.org/supervisor-meetings (Accessed: 12 July 2026). In text this source is cited as (Marsh, no date).

Formatting the Harvard reference list

Harvard uses a single reference list, alphabetised by author surname, with every source type interleaved: books, articles, and web pages all in one sequence. Do not number the entries and do not split the list into 'Books' and 'Websites' sections unless your department explicitly asks for it. Multiple works by the same author are ordered by date, oldest first, and same-year works take the a, b, c suffixes.

A reference list contains only what you cited. If your department asks for a bibliography as well, that is a separate, wider list including background reading; do not merge the two concepts, and do not pad the reference list with works you never cite, because examiners check in both directions.

The five most common Harvard referencing mistakes

Because Harvard is a family of variants, the most common failures are consistency failures rather than single wrong characters. The underlying rule for all five below: pick one authority for your Harvard, apply it to every entry, and re-check the whole list against it in one sitting near the end, not entry by entry as you go.

• Mixing variants. One entry formatted from your university's guide, another from Cite Them Right, a third from whatever a random generator emitted. Each may be defensible alone; the list still fails on consistency.
• Missing accessed dates. Every web source needs (Accessed: date). Reference lists assembled from browser tabs late at night lose these first.
• Double quotation marks around article titles. Cite Them Right uses single quotes for article and chapter titles; double quotes usually mean the entry was pasted from an APA or MLA formatted source.
• Ampersands. Harvard writes 'and' between authors in the text and the list alike. Stray ampersands are imported APA habits.
• Secondary references disguised as primary reading. Citing (Vygotsky, 1978) directly when you only read Doyle's summary misrepresents your reading; write (Vygotsky, 1978, cited in Doyle, 2016) or go and read the original.

Which Harvard are you being marked on?

Before you format anything, find the referencing page in your course or faculty handbook and identify the authority it names. If it names Cite Them Right, this guide maps directly onto what your marker expects. If it publishes its own examples, the local examples win wherever they differ, even where they contradict Cite Them Right, because the person marking your thesis wrote them.

This is also the strongest argument for generating references from stored data instead of hand-formatting them. When the style is a setting applied to structured records rather than thousands of hand-typed characters, switching variants or correcting a systematic error is one change, not an evening of retyping and a fresh crop of typos.

A quick Harvard checklist before submission

Run this pass over the finished reference list in one sitting, with your named Harvard authority open beside you. Checking one rule across all entries is faster and far more reliable than checking all the rules entry by entry, and it is how professional copy-editors work:

• Every in-text citation has a matching reference entry, and every entry is cited at least once.
• Article and chapter titles in single quotes; journal and book titles in italics.
• 'and' between authors everywhere; no ampersands anywhere.
• Books carry the edition (where not the first), the place of publication, and the publisher.
• Every web source ends with Available at: URL (Accessed: date).
• One DOI format used throughout, and year letters (2020a, 2020b) consistent between text and list.

Generate Harvard citations automatically

For a single reference, the free Harvard citation generator formats the entry from the details you give it. For a thesis, the Reference Manager holds every source as a database object tied to a real paper and renders the bibliography in Harvard or any of 11 other styles, so the in-text citations and the reference list cannot drift apart, and a change of variant is a re-render rather than a rewrite.

Formatting is also the smaller half of citation quality. A Harvard-perfect entry can still point at a paper that never said what you claim it said. CiteDash's Fact Checker verifies AI-drafted claims against held full-text PDFs before they reach you, and citations can only attach to papers that exist in the database, never to free-typed reference strings. For how the verification verdicts work in practice, see How verified citations work: the four verdicts.