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Harvard Referencing Guide (not including LHS): Getting Started - General Principles

General Principles of Referencing

The Harvard referencing style is an author-date system and is made up of two components.  

1. Citing within the text.

2. References at the end of the work.

What this means is that any sources used are referred to in the text by giving the author’s surname and the year of publication and then full the reference is listed at the end of the text. For example;

In-text
Discussing the impact of Internet of Things (IoE), Lawless et al. (2019) suggests that by 2020 5 billion people will have be linked...

Reference List
Lawless, W., Mittu, R., Sofge, D., Moskowitz, I.S. and Russell, S. eds. (2019) Artificial intelligence for the internet of everything.  San Diego: Elsevier.

Remember
All statements, ideas, opinions, conclusions etc. taken from another writer’s work in any medium (print, online or multimedia) should be cited, whether the work is directly quoted, paraphrased or summarised.

Consistency and accuracy are the key to successful referencing!

If you have any queries or questions about referencing please do not hesitate to contact your Library Subject Team.

Top Tips

If you haven't already, download the full  'A Guide to Referencing in the Harvard Style' and save it where you can find it quickly and easily.

  • Sentence Case For book titles, book chapter titles, journal article titles, musical works or artworks, only the first word of the title and proper nouns are given a capital letter.
  • Only include the reference once in the reference list, regardless of how many times it has been cited in the text.
  •  Web pages, if the publication date is not obvious it may be preferable to cite the year in which the page was accessed, e.g. (2021), rather than use (no date).
  • Quotations: as a general rule, if the quote is less than a line it may be included in the body of the text in double quotation marks. Longer quotations should be indented, single-spaced and appear in double quotation marks.
  • Diagrams, tables, illustrations, photographs, charts: should be referenced as though they were quotations, include page numbers after the year. Data in vertical columns and horizontal rows (with headings) are labelled as 'tables'. Maps, diagrams, graphs, illustrations or any type of visual source, are generally labelled as 'figures'. and are usually accompanied by a brief description and are listed throughout a piece of work by figure number.
    e.g. Figure 1. Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. (Smith and Jones, 1990 p.10).

Lecture /Tutorial Notes / BBL

Lecture or tutorial notes or slides, including those viewed or downloaded from Blackboard should not be referenced.

Where a lecturer makes reference to a published work as part of the lecture or seminar, cite the original work (book, journal, artistic work, etc.,) and not the lecture or seminar in which it is mentioned.

Secondary referencing

You may want to include a reference to work by an author (e.g. Maslow) which has been mentioned in another work you have read, written by Goede and Boshuizen-van Burken. This is called secondary referencing or secondary citing. You should cite both authors and the dates of their work within the text. 

However, you have only read Goede's work, so this is the only work that should appear in your reference list.

e.g.

In text:

A theoretical model by Maslow (1954, cited by Goede and Bushuizen-van Burken, 2019) showed that…

In your reference list:

Goede, R. and Boshuizen-van Burken, C. (2019) A critical systems thinking approach to empower refugees based on Maslow's theory of human motivation. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 36 (5), 715-726.

Note: Secondary referencing is not encouraged as you have only read Goede and Bushuizen-van Burkens' interpretation of Maslow’s work.

Why not source Maslow’s original text, read it and cite it in the normal way?

Following citations to the original, seminal work is an example of good scholarship.