Life and Health Sciences Harvard Referencing Guidelines: Harvard LHS - General Rules

Any piece of academic writing that you do at university or report writing during later employment will require a reference list. Referencing gives your writing very important elements such as:

• Transparency – ideas that you have included in your essay are clearly acknowledged.
• Reliability – material is provided from sources that have been written by experts.
• Traceability – people who want to check out facts that you have written can do so by easily finding your sources of information. 
• Credibility – material is taken from trustworthy sources and has not been made up by you or gleaned from unreliable sources.

This may include references to data, opinions, images and a range of other information. Where research data is included then confidentiality must be maintained e.g. by anonymising responses to surveys, removing details of a patient or client.

The need to avoid plagiarism and learning to reference properly are two key parts of the same process which you need to understand. Plagiarism is considered to be any attempt to use another person’s words, data, images or ideas and present them as your own. It is cheating. The University treats plagiarism as a very serious issue and has a clear policy on plagiarism and the penalties associated with it if you are found to have plagiarised. From the outset of your academic career you need to develop good academic practices to avoid plagiarism.

• By reading your sources of information and writing everything in your own words. 
• By properly referencing the sources of the information that you have used to write your essay, report or any other piece of assessment. 
• You can use information word for word but if you do this you must enclose the words in quotation marks and also reference the exact page from where you took the information.
• Do not copy the content of your own or another person’s previously submitted assignments.

These guidelines have been designed to help you correctly reference the work you use during your course, will help to ensure accuracy and consistency.   

There are a number of systems for the citation of references.  The Ulster University Faculty of Life and Health Sciences Harvard referencing style is a tailored version of Harvard for students within the faculty. Always check with your lecturer/supervisor which referencing style you are expected to use as not all LHS students will use it. School of Psychology students use the American Psychological Association (7th edition, 2020) referencing style whilst others may use the referencing style adhered to by particular journals. Again, if in doubt, ask your academic.

In using the Harvard system, also known as the author-date system, you need to do two things:

• In the text you must include an ‘in-text citation’ e.g. (Parahoo 2014)
• At the end of your work you must include a complete list of references, in alphabetical order by author’s surname.   

There must be a direct match between your in-text citation and the reference list at the end of your work with the exception of person-to-person communications.  

A bibliography is a separate list of relevant items that you have used in the preparation of the assignment but not necessarily cited in your text. If you include a bibliography in your work, this should also be in the Harvard style. It will demonstrate that you have read widely. Individual Schools in the Faculty will advise if a bibliography is required but for most assignments it is not required.

General guidelines, layout and punctuation

The purpose of a reference list is to enable the sources you have used to be easily located and checked by another reader. The Harvard style sets standards for the order and content of referencing information for different types of publication. There are certain common elements e.g. author, year of publication and title. Some variations of layout are acceptable, provided they are used consistently.

All items are listed alphabetically by author, editor or title (if there is no author) regardless of the format e.g. whether books, websites or journal articles etc. If there are several works from one author or other source, they should be listed together but in date order, with the earliest work listed first. If there are more than one author or editor, put in the word 'and' before the last surname.

Title page and edition details  

For books, use the title page, not the book cover, for the reference details. The title page is normally the first page of the book.  Only include the edition where it is not the first. A book with no edition stated is most commonly a first edition. 

Sentence Case

Note the use of sentence case for book titles, article titles etc. For most publication types capitalise the first letter of the first word in the title as well as any proper nouns. If a publication title has the ampersand '&' character in its displayed title, change this to the word 'and'.  

Numeracy in nursing and healthcare: calculations and practice.

Environmental policy in the European Union: actors, institutions and processes.

For publication types such as journal titles, acts of parliament, statutory instruments or titles of conference proceedings, capital letters are used for all words except for words that are articles (for example, a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (for example, and, but, or, for, nor) and prepositions (for example, on, at, to, by). Any ampersand symbols & are changed to the word and. For example:

International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology

Misuse of Drugs (Supervised Injecting Facilities) Act 2017.

Mobile HCI 2016: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct 

Online and Print formats of sources

If online materials (eBooks found via the Library Catalogue, Government Department reports etc.) are also available in printed format, then you should reference these items as print sources regardless of how you have viewed them. If in doubt reference the material as an online source. For journals, if the online article is identical in layout and pagination to the printed version, e.g. a pdf or scan, reference it as if it was print. If not, reference as an online source.

Lecture notes

Lecture and tutorial notes, whether downloaded from Blackboard Learn or not, they are not regarded as ‘published’ materials and are only intended as pointers toward published sources. In other words, you should not reference them in your coursework. 

However, scanned chapters, journal articles etc. found on reading lists are from original print sources, therefore it should be referenced.

Place of publication

For place of publication, give the town/city, not the state or country. If there are several places of publication, give the first town/city listed on the book or its Library Catalogue record.

If the place of publication is unclear, for example, it is Cambridge in the state of Massachusetts, USA not in England then add the accepted abbreviation for this e.g. Cambridge, MA. A list of accepted abbreviations is available here.  For Publishers omit terms such as Co. or Inc., but include the words Books or Press. 

Using quotations

If you want to include text from a published work in your essay then the words must be included within double quotation marks, and may be introduced by phrases such as:

The author stated that “……..” OR The author wrote that “……..”

If the quotation is less than a line, include it in the body of the text in double quotation marks.

The Department of Health Social Services and Public Safety (2011, p.vii) stated that mental health nurses “are highly valued by service users and carers”.

Use p. when the quote is taken from a single page of the original source.  

Longer quotations should be indented, single-spaced and appear in double quotation marks:

A study on the environmental pollution and waste disposal benefits of using recycled vehicle tyres mixed with soil, clay or rock for landscape construction found that:

“Depending on the applications, scrap tires can be used as whole tires, shredded tire (usually 50–300 mm in size), tire chips (the wire removed from a tire and a nominal size of about 12–50 mm), granulated and ground rubber (particle size ranging from 12 to 0.425 mm and 2 to 0.425 mm, respectively).” (Noorzad and Raveshi 2017, pp.1794-1795).

Use pp. when the quote is taken from more than one page of the original source.