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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.

Traditionally, Harvard referencing has been used mostly in the sciences (University of Chicago Press 2006). In the fine arts, history, and literature, the footnote-style documentary-note or humanities system has traditionally been preferred. The Vancouver system, a variation of Harvard referencing, has been used primarily for medical works. In recent decades, "most scholarly and professional organizations" have turned to Harvard referencing.

The Harvard referencing system consists of citations (in the text) and references (alphabetized in a References section). An example of a citation, providing the author's name, publication year, and page range, is at the end of this sentence (Deane 2001, 449–51). A corresponding example of a reference is

Deane, Sandra. 2001. Principles of trauma management. In Textbook of surgery, ed. J. Tjandra, G. Clunie, and R. Thomas, 434–65. Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing.

Harvard referencing is compatible with footnotes used for content notes. Harvard referencing is an alternative to footnotes used for reference notes (that is, the documentary-note system). Footnotes, if used for content notes, often contain Harvard referencing citations, just as the main text does.

Variants of Harvard referencing differ on issues such as punctuation (period or comma after a book or journal title) and quotation (not quoting or quoting an article title). This article follows the University of Chicago variant .

Citations and references

The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the author's surname, year of publication, and page number or range, all 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: Deane (2001) revolutionized the teaching of trauma surgery.

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.

Two or three authors are cited using and: (Deane, Nguyen, and D'Souza n. d.). The corresponding reference might be, for example,

Deane, Sandra, Howard Nguyen, and T. X. D'Souza. N. d. Laparoscopic surgery, http://example.org/lapasurg.html.

Four or more authors are cited using et alia (Deane et al. 1992).

A citation is placed wherever appropriate, as in the "Deane revolutionized" example above. If it is at the end of a sentence, a citation is placed before the period. For example: "Surgery is a team effort" (Deane et al. 1992, 17). But a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block.

References for all works cited are in alphabetical order in a section near the end of the citing work. Usually the section is called References or Works cited only if all entries are explicitly cited; otherwise it may be called Bibliography.

All citations and references are in the same font as the main text.

Examples of book references are

Smith, J. 2005a. Harvard referencing. Myakka, Florida: Wikimedia Foundation. ISBN 1-899235-74-4.

Smith, J. 2005b. More Harvard referencing. Myakka, 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. 2005. Protests halt online auction to shoot stag. The Guardian, October 18, http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1594716,00.html.

When book chapters or journal articles are referenced, the use of the word In, the choices of punctuation, and the placement of the page range may seem arbitrary. The following schematic examples highlight the differences.

Authors. Year. Chapter title. In Book title, page-range. City: Publisher. URL.

Authors. Year. Article title. Journal title volume-number: page-range, URL.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Harvard referencing

Notes

Warning: the items in this section follow neither the Harvard referencing system nor any other accepted guidelines for citing references. Do not consider these items to be examples of any footnote or reference system.

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. 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.
4. Chernin, Eli. "The "Harvard System: a mystery dispelled," British Medical Journal vol 297 October 22, 1988, 1062-1063.
5. A citation guide sponsored by an MIT-Microsoft joint venture states that "most scholarly and professional organizations have abandoned because redundant and cumbersome.... In the 1980s the Modern Language Association, the largest American organization of scholars in English and foreign literatures, changed its recommended form of citation from a note style to its own version of the parenthetical style" (Mayfield, section 10.3).
6. For example, Flinders University uses the comma and the quoting, at The Harvard referencing system: a simple guide. University of Chicago uses the other choices mentioned.

Further reading

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

• Bibliography
• Research
• Style guides