Harvard Referencing Guide for UK Students (Cite Them Right)

Harvard referencing is the style most UK university students meet first — and the one that quietly costs them marks every single term. The good news is that Harvard is a system, not a talent. Once you understand its two moving parts — the in-text citation and the reference list — and learn the pattern for the handful of source types you actually use, referencing becomes the most mechanical, reliable part of your assignment.

This guide explains Harvard referencing using the Cite Them Right version, the variant most UK universities follow. One important warning before we start: some universities publish their own Harvard variant with small differences (the University of Leeds style is a well-known example). Always check your course handbook — where your university’s guide differs from this one, your university’s guide wins.

The two parts of Harvard referencing

Every Harvard reference has two halves that must match each other:

1. The in-text citation — a short pointer inside your writing, giving the author’s surname and the year: (Smith, 2023). It tells the reader which source a point came from.
2. The reference list — a full, alphabetical list at the end of your work giving everything needed to find each source: author, year, title, publisher or journal, and DOI or URL where relevant.

The rule that ties them together: every source cited in your text must appear in your reference list, and everything in your reference list must be cited in your text. Markers check this. It is the easiest consistency win in academic writing.

In-text citations: the rules

One author

Use the surname and year, in brackets, usually at the end of the sentence the source supports:

Good referencing is a core academic skill (Brown, 2022).

If the author’s name is part of your sentence, only the year goes in brackets:

Brown (2022) argues that referencing is a core academic skill.

Two or three authors

Name every author in the citation:

(Taylor and Ahmed, 2021)
(Lee, Patel and Wong, 2020)

Four or more authors

Use the first author’s surname followed by et al. (in italics, with a full stop after “al.”):

(Johnson et al., 2023)

In the reference list, however, you list all the authors in full — et al. is only for in-text citations.

Quoting directly

When you copy a source’s exact words, put them in quotation marks and add the page number:

“Referencing is not an administrative chore but part of the scholarly conversation” (Brown, 2022, p. 47).

Short quotes (up to about two lines) sit inside your sentence like this. Longer quotes are usually set as an indented block without quotation marks — check your university’s guide.

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing — putting a source’s idea into your own words — still needs a citation. Changing the words does not make the idea yours. Cite exactly as you would for any other point: (Brown, 2022). A page number is not required for a paraphrase in Cite Them Right Harvard, but adding one for a specific point from a long source is never wrong.

Citing a source you found inside another source (secondary citation)

If you read about a study in a textbook rather than reading the study itself, be honest about it:

(Davies, 2018, cited in Brown, 2022)

Only the source you actually read (Brown, 2022) goes in your reference list. Use secondary citations sparingly — markers prefer to see that you read the original.

Same author, same year / no date / no author

• Two works by the same author in the same year: label them 2023a and 2023b, in both the citation and the reference list.
• No publication date: use (Author, no date).
• No named author: use the organisation as the author if there is one (common for reports and guidelines), or the title of the source.

The reference list: the pattern

A reference list entry answers four questions in a fixed order: Who wrote it? When? What is it called? Where can it be found? The punctuation and italics matter — in Harvard, the book or journal title is italicised. Below are worked examples for the three source types you will use most, plus the other common ones.

Example 1: Book

Format: Author, Initials. (Year) Title of book. Edition (if not the first). Place of publication: Publisher.

Brown, T. (2022) Academic writing skills for university students. 3rd edn. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Note the details: surname first, then initials; year in brackets; title in italics with only the first word and proper nouns capitalised (this is called sentence case); edition stated because it is not the first; city, colon, publisher.

Edited book chapter: cite the chapter author in your text, and reference the chapter like this:

Davies, S. (2018) ‘Critical reading’, in Brown, T. (ed.) Study skills for success. London: Sage, pp. 55–78.

Example 2: Journal article

Format: Author, Initials. (Year) ‘Title of article’, Title of Journal, Volume (Issue), pp. page range. Available at: DOI or URL (Accessed: date) — the DOI is preferred where one exists.

Taylor, R. and Ahmed, S. (2021) ‘Feedback literacy in higher education’, Studies in Higher Education, 46(3), pp. 512–528. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1234567

Journal article titles go in single quotation marks and are not italicised; the journal name is italicised and uses capital letters for its main words. Give the full page range with an en dash (pp. 512–528, not 512–28). Most journal articles now have a DOI — a permanent link starting 10. — and Cite Them Right prefers it over a long database URL. Only add “(Accessed: …)” when you give a web address that could change, not for a DOI.

Example 3: Website

Format: Author or organisation, (Year the page was published or last updated) Title of page. Available at: URL (Accessed: day month year).

Nursing and Midwifery Council (2018) The Code: professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses, midwives and nursing associates. Available at: https://www.nmc.org.uk/standards/code/ (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

Websites are where students slip most often. The rules that save you: use the organisation as author when no person is named; use the year the page was published or updated (look at the bottom of the page — if there is genuinely no date, write “no date”); always give the full URL and the date you accessed it, because web content changes.

Other source types in brief

• Report (e.g. a government or NHS report): Organisation (Year) Title. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).
• Newspaper article: Author, Initials. (Year) ‘Headline’, Newspaper Name, day month. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).
• Lecture slides / course materials: Lecturer, Initials. (Year) Title of slides. Module code: Module title. Available at: your VLE (Accessed: date). Cite VLE material carefully — it supports points but carries less weight than published sources.
• Image or figure: Creator (Year) Title. Available at: URL (Accessed: date) — and label it “Figure 1” in your text with the citation underneath.

Quick-reference table

Figures, tables and your own course materials

Assignments increasingly include material that is not a book, journal or website, and students often guess at these. Three worth getting right:

• A figure or table you reproduce (a chart, diagram or image): caption it beneath the item as “Figure 1: [your description]” and cite the source in the caption — Author (Year) as usual. The full entry for the source goes in your reference list like any other.
• Lecture slides and VLE content: Lecturer’s surname, Initials. (Year) Title of the slides or resource. Module code and title. Available at: your institution’s virtual learning environment (Accessed: date). Use these to support points of fact from your course, but build your main argument on published sources — markers give VLE citations limited weight.
• A personal communication (an email from a tutor, an interview you conducted for a project): cite it in text only — (J. Smith, personal communication, 3 March 2026) — and do not put it in the reference list, because your reader cannot retrieve it.

How many references should you have?

Students ask this constantly, and there is no official number — but there is a workable rule of thumb. Markers judge the quality, relevance and spread of your sources first: a 2,000-word essay built on eight well-chosen, genuinely used sources (a core textbook, several journal articles, perhaps one policy document) will outscore one padded with twenty-five listed-but-barely-read items. As a rough guide many tutors expect around one solid source per 150–250 words of assignment, weighted towards journal articles as you progress through your degree, and dissertation chapters should show noticeably wider reading than a short essay. If your module handbook or marking rubric states an expectation, that overrides any rule of thumb — rubric first, always.

The common mistakes that lose marks

1. A reference list full of sources you never cited (or citations with no list entry). The two halves must match exactly.
2. Using “et al.” in the reference list. Reference lists name every author. Et al. lives only in in-text citations for four or more authors.
3. Alphabetising by first name or by title. The list is ordered A–Z by the first author’s surname.
4. Copying references from Google Scholar or a database without checking them. Auto-generated references are frequently wrong in Harvard — wrong punctuation, missing publishers, DOIs as messy URLs. Always rebuild them in the format above.
5. Citing the page you found a quote on, not the source of the quote — or worse, copying someone else’s reference list wholesale. If you have not read it, either read it or use a secondary citation honestly.
6. Missing access dates on websites and broken, shortened or session URLs copied from a library database login.
7. Referencing as an afterthought. Adding references at 3 a.m. the night before the deadline is how mistakes 1–6 happen. Keep a running list as you write — future you says thank you.
8. Treating Harvard as one fixed style. Cite Them Right, Leeds Harvard and other university variants differ in small ways. Your handbook is the final authority.

A two-minute referencing routine that works

Build the reference as you write, not afterwards. Each time you use a source: write the in-text citation immediately, add the full entry to a running list at the end of your draft, and note the page number for anything you quoted. When you finish, sort the list alphabetically, delete anything you did not cite, and check every citation in the text has its partner in the list. That is genuinely all there is to it.

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