Harvard Referencing Guide

Every reference has two parts, and they only work as a pair. One points to the other.

If a citation appears in your text, its reference must appear in your list. If a reference is in your list, it must be cited somewhere in your text. Nothing sits on its own.

A citation needs the author's surname, the year, and a page number if you are quoting directly or pointing at a specific passage. There are two ways to place it, and both are correct.

Narrative or parenthetical

Vary the two. A page of nothing but brackets is hard going, and a page where every sentence starts with a surname reads like a list.

How many authors

Use and, never an ampersand. et al. means "and others" and takes a full stop after al. Your reference list follows the same rule: name the first author, then et al.

Page numbers, paragraphs and timestamps

You always need a locator for a direct quotation. You should give one for a paraphrase too, if you are drawing on a specific passage rather than the argument of the whole work.

• p. for one page, pp. for a range: (Smith, 2024, p. 23) or (Smith, 2024, pp. 23–36)
• para. where there are no page numbers, such as a web page. Count down from the top of the page: (Hinton, 2024, para. 4)
• A timestamp for video and audio, in minutes and seconds: (McEwan, 2023, 14:20)
• A section heading where nothing else is available: (Newman, 2016, Sources of evidence)

These are the cases people get stuck on. Each one has a settled answer.

Three ways of using a source, and all three need a citation. Most of your assignment should be paraphrase and summary, in your own words. Quotations are for when the exact wording matters.

Short quotations

Up to about two or three lines. Put them in quotation marks and keep them in your paragraph. Single or double marks are both fine, as long as you pick one and stay with it.

Greetham (2014, p. 336) warns that 'your research may not reveal what you expect'.

Longer quotations

Set them out as their own indented paragraph, with no quotation marks. The indent is what tells the reader it is a quotation.

Paraphrasing

Putting an author's point into your own words, at roughly the same length. Done properly it reads in your voice, fits your argument, and shows you understood what you read. Changing a few words and leaving the sentence structure intact is not paraphrasing.

Note that the paraphrase still carries a page range. If you are drawing on specific pages, say which ones.

Summarising

A short statement of the main points of a chapter, article or whole book, with the detail left out. Shorter than a paraphrase, and useful when you need to place a source in your argument without dwelling on it.

Pears (2013, pp. 29–30) identified the criteria for professional status as control of specific knowledge, corporate identity, charging fees, and the use of language and clothing to denote membership.

If you are summarising a whole work rather than part of it, you do not need a page number.

This is when you read about a piece of work inside somebody else's writing, but have not read the original yourself. It happens constantly with the classic texts, because so much of the counselling literature discusses Rogers, Bowlby and Freud rather than reproducing them.

Be honest about it. Name both, and make clear which one you actually read.

Bowlby (1969, cited in Holmes, 2014, p. 42) proposed that attachment behaviour is activated by threat.

Your reference list contains only Holmes, because Holmes is the book in your hands. Bowlby does not appear, because you have not read him.

One list, at the end of your assignment, headed References.

• Alphabetical by author surname, with every type of source mixed together. No separate sections for books, websites and journals.
• Only what you cited. If it is not in your text, it does not go in the list. A list of everything you read is a bibliography, and it is a different thing. Only include one if the brief asks for it.
• No numbering and no bullets. Just the entries, one after another.
• Same author, several works: earliest first.
• Same author, same year: use 2024a, 2024b, matching the letters in your text.
• Same lead author, some works with co-authors: works they wrote alone come first, then joint works ordered by the second author's surname.
• Web addresses go in as plain text. Turn off the automatic blue underline if your word processor adds one.
• A hanging indent looks tidy but is not required. Consistency matters more.

A worked reference list

Anderson alone comes before Anderson and Atherton. The two Millers are lettered because they share a year. Singh is in date order. The organisation files under B for British, not under E for Ethical.

Find your source type below. Each card gives the pattern, a worked example, and how it looks in your text.

Books and chapters

Journals and articles

Websites and online sources

Video, audio and broadcast

Reports, law and unpublished sources

Guild course material

These are the sources you will reach for most on this course, and they are the ones general referencing guides never cover.

If you use a screen reader, converted files, printed copies of online material, or anything else that changes how a source reaches you, some parts of standard Harvard simply will not fit. Page numbers in a PDF are hard to find with a screen reader. Converted files renumber themselves. None of that is your problem to solve alone.

Speak to your tutor at the start of the course, not the night before a deadline. Agree between you how you will reference, and if you settled something on a previous unit, tell them so you are not renegotiating it every time. What follows is a starting point for that conversation rather than a fixed rule, because the right answer depends on your circumstances and on what you are writing.

Material you converted yourself

Reference the original, then say what you converted it to, in square brackets at the end.

Miller, E. and Pole, A. (2010) 'Diagnosis blog: checking up on health blogs in the blogosphere', American Journal of Public Health, 100(8), pp. 1514–1519. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.175125 [Converted to MP3].

Printed copies of online material

Follow the format for the online version, but drop Available at and Accessed, and add [Print] at the end. There is no live link for your reader to follow, so there is nothing to give them.

Thompson, K. (2003) 'Fantasy, franchises and Frodo Baggins', The Velvet Light Trap, 52(3), pp. 45–63 [Print].

Where page numbers are missing or hard to reach

Use a section heading in your citation instead. The heading does not go in the reference.

Newman (2016, Sources of evidence) states that…
Newman, E. (2016) Jesus in history: scholarly interpretation and controversy. The Open University.

Audio and text-to-speech

Use a timestamp in minutes and seconds, and note the format at the end of the reference.

Newman (2016, 10:12) states that…
Newman, E. (2016) Jesus in history: scholarly interpretation and controversy. The Open University [MP3].

Page numbers in converted files

These often differ from the original, which can send a reader to the wrong place. Give the page you have and record the conversion, so the difference is accounted for.

Newman (2016, p. 15) states that…
Newman, E. (2016) Jesus in history: scholarly interpretation and controversy. The Open University [Converted to Word].

Ask your tutor before you use one. Some units allow AI for planning or proofreading, some do not permit it at all. The brief for the unit you are writing is what governs it, not this page.

Three things to hold on to:

• An AI tool is not a source. It cannot be checked, it does not stay the same between two people asking the same question, and it does not know anything. It is a thing you used, not evidence you can cite in support of an argument.
• It invents references that look completely real. Plausible authors, plausible journals, plausible page numbers, and no such article. Never put a reference in your list because an AI gave it to you. Find the original, read it, and reference what you read.
• Declare it if you used it. Say what you used it for, in a note or wherever the brief tells you. Passing off AI writing as your own is treated the same as passing off anybody else's.

Where you do need to reference the tool itself:

Your assignments exist to show your own thinking. That is the whole reason they are set, and it is the one thing no tool can do for you.

A reference manager is a free program that keeps all your sources in one place and writes your references for you. You save a book or article once, and from then on it can drop the citation into your assignment and build the reference list at the end, in the correct format, without you typing any of it.

We recommend Zotero. It is free with no student version to pay for, it is what most universities point their students at, and it is already listed under Study tools in your Student Resources. Others exist, such as Mendeley and EndNote, and if you already use one happily there is no need to change.

Zotero does three things:

• Saves a source. You are looking at a journal article or a web page, you click one button, and the author, title and date are stored.
• Inserts the citation. While you are writing, you pick the source from a list and it puts (Rogers, 1957) into your sentence.
• Builds the reference list. One click at the end, alphabetical, correctly formatted. Add a source later and the list updates itself.

Learn the rules above first even so. A reference manager only knows what it saved, and it saves the wrong thing often enough that you need to be able to spot it. Think of it as a fast typist rather than a proofreader.

Is there a tool that does this for me?

Yes. Install two things: the Zotero app (opens in a new tab) for your computer, and the browser connector that saves sources into it. Zotero's Quick Start Guide (opens in a new tab) walks through both.

One setting to change before you start: in Zotero, set the citation style to Cite Them Right 12th edition (Harvard). There are thousands of styles and they all look slightly different, so picking the wrong one is the most common reason a reference manager produces something that does not match this guide.

Watch someone set it up

A walkthrough of the app, the connector and the Word plugin, from Grad Coach. It starts at the point where Zotero is being introduced.

This is somebody else's work, so it gets referenced like anything else. Following the format in this guide:

Grad Coach (2023) How to use Zotero (including Zotero Connector): full tutorial with examples. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnbwKj6-pD8 (Accessed: 7 August 2026).

In your text that would be (Grad Coach, 2023). Note the video is not ours and is not part of the Guild's teaching material: it is a third-party tutorial we think is useful.

Setting it up in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari

The connector is a small add-on for your web browser. It puts a save button in your toolbar, so when you are reading something worth keeping you click once and it lands in Zotero. Chrome, Edge and Firefox each have their own download on the Zotero download page (opens in a new tab).

Safari is different. Its connector is bundled inside the Zotero app rather than downloaded separately: install Zotero, then switch the extension on in Safari under Settings, Extensions. Zotero explains this in Zotero Connector and Safari (opens in a new tab).

What the button does once it is installed is covered in Adding Items to Zotero (opens in a new tab).

Using it in Microsoft Word

You do not install anything extra for Word: it arrives with Zotero itself. Open Word after installing and there will be a new Zotero tab along the top, next to Home and Insert. That tab is where you add a citation as you write, and where you press the button that builds the reference list. See Word Processor Plugins (opens in a new tab).

The same plugin covers LibreOffice, if that is what you use.

Using it in Google Docs

Google Docs needs no separate download either. Once the browser add-on is installed, a Zotero menu appears along the top of Google Docs and works the same way as it does in Word. See Using Zotero with Google Docs (opens in a new tab).

The rest of Zotero's help, by what you are trying to do

Zotero's documentation is large and organised the way Zotero thinks, not the way a student in the middle of an assignment thinks. These are the pages worth knowing about, grouped by the problem you are actually having. All of them are Zotero's own pages, so they stay current without us touching them.

Does it work with Apple Pages?

No. Zotero's plugins cover Microsoft Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs only. There is no Pages plugin.

If you prefer Pages, you have two sensible options. Write in Word or Google Docs so the plugin works. Or stay in Pages and paste finished references across from Zotero using Creating Bibliographies (opens in a new tab), which copies a formatted reference straight to the clipboard. You lose the automatic updating, but you keep the correct formatting.

Whichever route you take, check the output against this guide before you submit. A reference manager is only as good as the record it saved, and web pages in particular often save with the wrong author or no date.

• Every citation in the text has a matching reference in the list
• Every reference in the list is cited somewhere in the text
• Direct quotations all carry a page number, paragraph number or timestamp
• The list is alphabetical by surname, with all source types mixed together
• Author names use and, not an ampersand
• Book and journal titles are in italics, article and chapter titles in single quotation marks
• Accessed dates are on ordinary web links, but not on DOIs
• Web addresses are plain text, not blue and underlined
• Nothing in the list came from an AI without you finding and reading it first
• No client, session or placement material anywhere in the references