Life and Health Sciences Harvard Referencing Guidelines: Corporate Author Publications

Some publications do not have a personal author or editor; instead they are authored by a body such as an association, company, government department etc.

The required elements for the reference are:

Corporate author. (Year) Title. Place of publication: Publisher.

With a corporate author, capital letters are used for all words except for those which are articles (e.g. a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (e.g. and, but, or, for, nor) and prepositions (e.g. on, at, to, by).

The place of publication should distinguish between organisations with an identical name e.g. London: Department of Health; Belfast: Department of Health.

If the work is by a recognised organisation and has no personal author then it is usually cited under the body that commissioned the work. This applies to publications by associations, companies, and government departments etc. such as Department of Health (DH), Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) or Royal College of Nursing (RCN).

It is acceptable to use standard abbreviations for these bodies, e.g. NIEA, in your text, providing that the full name is given at the first citing with the abbreviation in brackets.

Reference List

Example of the full reference at the end of your assignment:

Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety. (2013) Delivering excellence supporting recovery: a professional framework for mental health in Northern Ireland (2011-2016). Belfast: DHSSPS.

In-text citation (first citation)

Example 1 - where the author's name occurs naturally in the sentence

The Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) (2013) classifies the quality of …

In-text citation (2nd and subsequent citations) 

Example 2 - where the author's name occurs naturally in the sentence

In the DHSSPS (2013) report on the quality of …

Points to note: 

• There are some exceptions to this such as BBC where the abbreviations or initials form part of the official name.