Harvard Referencing: Cite Them Right 13, with Real Examples

Quick Answer: how to reference in Harvard

Put the author's surname and the year in round brackets wherever you use a source, add a page number for a quotation or a specific passage, and give the full details once in a Reference list ordered alphabetically by surname. In Cite Them Right Harvard the year sits in brackets with no full stop after it, article and chapter titles take single quotation marks, book and journal titles are italicised, and web pages end with Available at: URL (Accessed: 5 October 2026). If your module handbook names another Harvard, that sheet wins.

What "Harvard referencing" actually means

Harvard is a name for a method, not a publication. Any style that cites by author and year in the text and lists sources alphabetically at the end is a Harvard-type or author-date style, which is why APA and Chicago author-date look similar. Harvard University does not publish or maintain it. The library FAQ, opened for this rewrite on 5 October 2026, still says so:

That (Robbins 1987) example is the proof students need. Even the campus the style is named after describes author-date without the Cite Them Right comma. A sheet that says "Harvard never uses a comma" and a sheet that says "Harvard always uses a comma" can both be quoting a real handbook. Neither sheet is the Harvard manual. The scholarly article Harvard Library still points to is Chernin (1988) in the BMJ.

Cite Them Right 13th edition (2025)

The version most UK universities now point to is Cite Them Right: The Essential Referencing Guide by Richard Pears and Graham Shields, 13th edition (Bloomsbury Academic, 1 May 2025; paperback ISBN 9781350477261), with the same content online at Cite Them Right Online. This guide uses that edition throughout. The 13th edition dropped the place of publication from book references, added guidance on AI-generated material, and tells you to write article rather than article number when a journal uses an article ID instead of pages. The University of Dundee still lists those summer 2025 changes. If your department sheet still shows a city before the publisher, it was written from the 12th edition or earlier: follow the sheet.

Do not copy Westminster's live book line as the official Cite Them Right 13 reference. On 5 October 2026 the Westminster Harvard page still printed Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2025) Cite them right: the essential guide to referencing, 13th ed. Macmillan. The book's own title is Cite Them Right: The Essential Referencing Guide; the imprint is Bloomsbury Academic, not Macmillan; and Cite Them Right Harvard writes 13th edn, not 13th ed. Use the Bloomsbury line:

This page teaches Harvard alone. The Harvard vs APA comparison restyles the same Hunt, Bandura, and NICE sources into APA 7. Do not treat those two assignments as the same format.

The common Harvard variants

Campus sheets still disagree about commas, brackets, places of publication, and the words before a URL. Two of the named leftovers have now moved to Cite Them Right: Anglia Ruskin switched in September 2022, and UWE Bristol replaced UWE Bristol Harvard from September 2026. The older PDFs remain on the open web, which is why students still mix them.

ARU's archived comparison page still shows Stella Cottrell's The study skills handbook, 5th edition (Red Globe Press, 2019) as the book it restyles. That is a real title; use it to recognise an old ARU PDF, not as the current ARU rule.

In-text citations: (Author, Year) and (Author, Year, p. X)

A Harvard citation is the surname of the author (or the organisation) and the year of publication. It goes inside round brackets at the point where you use the source, or the name goes into your sentence and only the year sits in brackets. Add a page number whenever you quote, and whenever you refer to a specific passage rather than the work as a whole. Cite Them Right puts a comma between the author and the year; Harvard Library's own (Robbins 1987) and the current Australian Style Manual leave it out. Copy whichever your university shows. The full set of forms is on the Harvard in-text citation page.

Cite Them Right names one, two, or three authors in the parenthesis and switches to et al. only at four. Westminster applies that cutoff in both the citation and the reference list unless a lecturer asks for every name in the list:

Quotations

Cite Them Right uses single quotation marks for a short quotation run into your sentence, with a page or paragraph locator in the citation. Double quotation marks are used only for a quotation inside a quotation. Use p. for one page and pp. for a range. For a source without page numbers, such as a web page, give a paragraph or section if the reader would otherwise struggle to find the passage. Westminster restates the length cut as three lines:

Reference list entries for the main source types

Every reference follows the same skeleton: who (surname and initials, or the organisation), when (the year in round brackets), what (the title, italicised for a whole work and in single quotation marks for a part of a work), then the details a reader needs to find it. Titles of books and articles are written in sentence case: capital for the first word and proper nouns only. Journal titles keep title case. Initials are followed by full stops; some sheets space them (J. M.) and some do not (J.M.). Be consistent. The worked pages for a book, a journal article and a website go into more edge cases than there is room for here.

Book

Author, year, italic title, edition if it is not the first, publisher. Cite Them Right 13 gives no place of publication; add Place: before the publisher only if your sheet still asks for it. For an ebook that looks like the print book (a PDF with page numbers, or a library copy), reference it as a print book. Westminster says the same. For an ebook read on a device without fixed pages, add Available at: URL (Accessed: date). Editors take (ed.) or (eds) after the name.

Chapter in an edited book

Reference the chapter author, not the editor, because that is the name you cite in the text. The chapter title takes single quotation marks, then in introduces the editor and the italic book title, and the page range of the chapter closes the entry. Westminster's live specimen is Elizabeth Edwards in Stephen Bull's A companion to photography (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). The printed table of contents puts that chapter on pages 97–112.

Journal article with a DOI

The article title goes in single quotation marks and the journal title in italics, followed by the volume, the issue in brackets, and the page range with pp. If the article has a DOI, give it as a full https://doi.org/ link after Available at:. Cite Them Right and most university FAQs do not add an accessed date after a DOI, because a DOI is permanent. An article read in print, or as a PDF identical to the print version, can stop at the page range. See how to use DOIs.

Website or web page

The author is often an organisation; use the name exactly as the site gives it, and use it again as the in-text citation. The page title is italicised. Give the year the page was published or last updated; if there is none, write (no date) in both the reference and the citation. Web references always end with the URL and the date you read the page, in the form (Accessed: 5 October 2026). — day, month written out, year, inside round brackets, followed by a full stop. Do not add the site name after the title unless it differs from the author. Westminster's no-date specimen is Phil Race's advice page, which still has no publication date on 5 October 2026.

Report or guideline

Reports and guidelines are usually published by the organisation that wrote them, so the same name can appear as author and, for a print report, as publisher. Add a report or series number when there is one. A report read online is referenced like a web document, with Available at: and an accessed date. Dundee's current Cite Them Right page gives two legal options for an organisation known by its initials. The specimen is NICE guideline NG137, Twin and triplet pregnancy, last reviewed on the NICE page on 9 April 2024:

Lecture or lecture slides

Cite Them Right treats a lecture you attended and slides posted on the virtual learning environment as different sources, and both use a square-bracketed description after the title. Give the module code and title, then the institution, and the date of the lecture. Slides downloaded from the VLE take an Available at: line and an accessed date. Check your sheet before relying on this pattern: lectures are the source type where university variants diverge most, and some departments tell students not to reference lectures at all but to find the published source the lecturer used. The examples below are labelled templates, not a real module. The lecture notes page shows more variants.

Online video (YouTube and similar)

The author is the person or channel that posted the video, using the screen name shown. The video title is italicised, the day and month of posting follow it, and the entry ends with the URL and an accessed date. Westminster's live specimen is the TED upload of Ken Robinson's talk, posted 10 May 2013. Cite the channel TED, not the speaker, unless your sheet says otherwise. See a YouTube video in Harvard for playlists and timestamps.

Newspaper article

The article title takes single quotation marks and the newspaper title is italicised. A print article ends with the day, month and page; an online article replaces the page with Available at: and an accessed date. If no journalist is named, begin with the newspaper title in the author position and cite the newspaper in the text. Westminster's live specimen is Alexis Petridis in The Guardian (16 March 2015). The live headline on 5 October 2026 is slightly longer than Westminster's shortened line; use the title the article actually carries. See a newspaper article in Harvard.

Secondary referencing: "cited in"

Secondary referencing is citing a work you have not read because another work you have read discusses it. Cite Them Right's rule, as Westminster and UWE both restate it, is simple: name both in the text, using cited in for a paraphrase and quoted in for a direct quotation, and put only the work you actually read in the reference list. Use this sparingly; markers expect you to find the original when it is available. Give the page of the source you read, not the page of the original. See citing a secondary source.

Formatting the reference list

• Heading: Westminster tells students to head the page references or list of references, not bibliography, and to include only sources that have an in-text citation. Use Bibliography only if the list also contains works you read but did not cite, and only if your sheet allows that — see reference list vs bibliography.
• Order: one alphabetical list by the first author's surname (or organisation name), whatever the source type. Do not split books from websites, and do not number the entries.
• Same author, several works: oldest first. Same author, same year: add a, b, c after the year in the order the titles fall alphabetically, and use the same letters in the text — see same author, same year.
• Same surname, different authors: order by initials. An organisation is filed under the first significant word of its name.
• Indentation: Cite Them Right does not require a hanging indent. Many UK sheets use none; some ask for one. If yours does, the hanging indent formatter applies it.
• Spacing: usually single-spaced entries with a blank line between them, but this is a university rule rather than a Cite Them Right rule.
• Every citation matches an entry and every entry has at least one citation. Personal communications such as emails and conversations are cited in the text only, with the date, and do not appear in the list — see personal communications.

Cite Them Right Harvard next to Australian author-date

The variant that trips up students moving between systems is Australian author-date. Many older Australian and New Zealand university sheets still follow the Australian Government Publishing Service Style Manual, 6th edition (2002): no comma in the text, commas between every list element, publisher before place, and viewed 5 October 2026. The current Australian Government Style Manual, updated 18 February 2026, has moved to a form with the year in brackets in the list and accessed rather than viewed. It still forbids the comma in the parenthesis:

How to check which Harvard your university wants

1. Read the assignment brief and the module handbook first. If either names a version ("Cite Them Right Harvard", "Leeds Harvard", "ARU Harvard") or links to a PDF, that document wins over everything, including this guide.
2. If the brief only says "Harvard", search your library website for referencing. Most UK libraries now name Cite Them Right. Typical pages: University of Westminster, University of Dundee, Anglia Ruskin Cite Them Right, UWE Bristol Cite Them Right. Leeds still publishes Leeds Harvard.
3. Compare one book reference from that page against the variants table above. The year (brackets or not), the place of publication, and the wording before the URL tell you which family you are in.
4. Check three details that vary even between Cite Them Right sheets: whether initials are spaced, where et al. starts in the reference list, and whether an accessed date follows a DOI.
5. Pick one version and use it everywhere. Markers penalise a mixture far more than they penalise a variant they did not expect.
6. Run the finished list through the Harvard citation checker for missing elements and punctuation slips.

Common Harvard mistakes

• A full stop after the year: Hunt, L. (2004). is APA punctuation, not Cite Them Right.
• An ampersand between authors: Harvard writes Pears, R. and Shields, G., and (Pears and Shields, 2025) in the text.
• Double quotation marks around article titles, or no quotation marks at all. Cite Them Right uses single ones.
• Italicising the article title and leaving the journal title plain. It is the other way round.
• Accessed 5 October 2026 without the colon and brackets, or a US-order date such as October 5, 2026. Write (Accessed: 5 October 2026).
• Citing the editor instead of the chapter author — (Bull, 2020) for Edwards's chapter.
• Listing the original work in a secondary reference when you only read the work that cited it.
• Switching to et al. at three authors in the text. Cite Them Right names three — (Bandura, Ross and Ross, 1961) — and shortens at four.
• A bibliography padded with unread sources when the brief asked for a reference list.
• Mixing two variants: a Leeds-style year without brackets in one entry and Cite Them Right brackets in the next.
• Copying Westminster's Macmillan line for Pears and Shields instead of the Bloomsbury 13th edition.
• Using leftover UWE Bristol Harvard (Available from: and square-bracketed accessed dates) on a UWE assignment set after September 2026.

Related guides and official manuals

• Harvard vs APA: Cite Them Right 13 vs APA 7
• Referencing vs citing: what is the difference?
• Reference list vs bibliography
• How to cite a website in Harvard
• How to cite a book in Harvard
• How to cite a journal article in Harvard
• How to cite a book chapter in Harvard
• Citing multiple authors
• Citing a source with no author
• Citing a source with no date
• Citing a secondary source
• How to cite AI
• How to use DOIs
• Which citation style should I use?
• Cite Them Right Online
• Harvard Library: is there a Harvard citation style?
• University of Westminster: Harvard (Cite Them Right)
• University of Dundee: Harvard Cite Them Right
• Anglia Ruskin: Cite Them Right Harvard
• UWE Bristol: Cite Them Right Harvard (from September 2026)
• University of Leeds: Leeds Harvard introduction
• Australian Government Style Manual: author-date
• Bloomsbury: Cite Them Right 13th edition
• NICE NG137: Twin and triplet pregnancy