Free Harvard Citation Generator
Generate correctly formatted Harvard-style citations for journal articles, books, and websites. Enter a DOI to auto-fill the details, or use manual entry — then copy the formatted citation straight into your reference list.
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How Harvard Referencing Works
Harvard is an author-date referencing style widely used across UK and Australian universities, especially in business, humanities, and social sciences. Like APA, it cites the author's surname and year in-text, with full details in an alphabetized reference list — but its punctuation and formatting conventions differ.
Harvard Journal Article Citation
Smith, J.A. and Lee, K. (2021) 'Understanding academic motivation in graduate students', Journal of Educational Psychology, 14(2), pp.112-128.
Format: Author(s) (Year) 'Title of article', Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pp.pages.
Harvard Book Citation
Smith, J.A. (2020) Research methods in social science. 3rd edn. London: Academic Press.
Format: Author(s) (Year) Title of book. Edition. Place of publication: Publisher.
Harvard Website Citation
Smith, J.A. (2022) How to write a literature review. Available at: https://example.com/article (Accessed: 4 March 2024).
Format: Author (Year) Title of page. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).
Harvard In-Text Citations
Harvard in-text citations look like (Smith and Lee, 2021) — note "and" is written out, not replaced with "&" as in APA. For direct quotes, add a page number: (Smith, 2021, p.45).
Harvard vs APA
Harvard and APA are both author-date styles and often confused, but Harvard uses "and" instead of "&", single quotation marks around article titles, "pp." before page numbers without a space, and requires an access date for online sources — none of which APA does. Always check which variant your institution expects, since "Harvard" isn't a single fixed standard.
Questions fréquentes
Not exactly — Harvard referencing has several institutional variants with small formatting differences. This tool follows the most common convention; check your department's specific style guide for any local variations.
Access dates are mainly required for web pages that can change over time. Journal articles with a stable DOI typically don't need one.
List them chronologically in the reference list; if published the same year, distinguish them with a, b, c after the year (e.g. 2021a, 2021b) in both the in-text citation and reference list.