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Harvard referencing generator
Paste a DOI, ISBN or link and get a Harvard style reference. Check it against your own department's guide, because Harvard is not one fixed standard.
DOI, ISBN and PubMed lookups go directly from your browser to Crossref, OpenLibrary or NCBI. We do not receive your identifier. Web links need details you enter yourself. How this works · Privacy
What a reference in Harvard looks like
The shape is always the same: who, when, what, where. Once you can see it, you can check any reference a generator gives you, including this one.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
Author, A. (Year) 'Title of article', Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pp. pages.
Aspelmeyer, M. (2009) 'Measured measurement', Nature Physics, 5(1), pp. 11-12.
BOOK
Author, A. (Year) Title of book. Publisher.
Dahl, R. (1988) Matilda. Jonathan Cape.
WEB PAGE
Author (Year) Title of page. Available at: URL (Accessed: Day Month Year).
World Health Organization (2024) Air quality and health. Available at: https://www.who.int/ (Accessed: 8 September 2026).
Three things Harvard asks for that people get wrong
Harvard is a family, not a standard
This is the single most important thing to know about it. There is no central Harvard authority, and universities publish their own variants that disagree on punctuation, italics and the order of elements. Cite Them Right is the most widely followed in the UK, and is what this generator follows.
Always check your institution's guide
Because of the above, a Harvard reference that is correct at one university can be marked wrong at another. If your department publishes a guide, it outranks any generator, including this one.
Access dates are usual for web pages
Unlike APA 7, most Harvard variants still expect 'Available at:' followed by an access date for online sources.
Need a different style?
Questions
Which Harvard does this follow?
The Cite Them Right variant, which is the most widely used in UK universities. Your department may follow a different one.
Why does my university's Harvard look different?
Because there is no single Harvard standard. Institutions maintain their own guides and they genuinely differ. Follow the one you are marked against.
Is Harvard the same as author-date?
Harvard is an author-date system, but not the only one. APA and Chicago's author-date variant work the same way and are not called Harvard.
THE ANDROID APP
Keep them, export them, and check your draft
CiteRight for Android writes Harvard and other supported styles, keeps your references in projects, exports a bibliography, and checks a draft sentence by sentence for text that overlaps a source.