Harvard Referencing Generator

About the Harvard Referencing Generator

“Harvard” is a family of author–date referencing styles rather than one standard. This generator follows the version in Cite Them Right (Pears and Shields, Bloomsbury), which many UK universities — and others that adopt it — set for coursework, in its current 13th edition. It creates reference-list entries and in-text citations for books, chapters in edited books, journal articles, newspaper, magazine and blog articles, web pages, reports, theses, YouTube videos and films, data sets and software.

Universities often tweak the details, so Institution settings switch the common differences: “Available at:” or “Available from:”, the access-date format and brackets, “ed.” or “edn”, the place of publication, a full stop after the year, single or double quotation marks, italic or plain “et al.”, and whether four or more authors are all named in the reference list. Paste a DOI, ISBN or web address to fill in the form, or type the details yourself.

Common uses

• Reference lists for coursework at universities that use Cite Them Right Harvard.
• Adapting references to a department’s own Harvard variant with the institution switches.
• Referencing web pages and videos with the access date in the exact format your handbook shows.
• Collecting every source for an essay in one alphabetised reference list, ready to paste into Word or Google Docs.

Cite Them Right Harvard rules used by default

• Authors: surname and initials without spaces (Jackson, S.J.); “and” before the last name, with no comma before it; four or more authors become the first author and et al. in the text.
• Year in round brackets straight after the authors, with no full stop: Cottrell, S. (2011). With no date, “(no date)”.
• Titles: book, report, web-page and video titles in italics; article and chapter titles in single quotation marks; journal titles in italics.
• Books: edition only if it is not the first (2nd ed.); publisher without the place of publication (dropped in the 13th edition). For a reprint or translation, the original year follows the name and the reprint’s year follows the publisher — Freud, S. (1915) The unconscious. Translated by Graham Frankland. Penguin, 2015 — and the in-text citation uses the same year as the entry: (Freud, 1915). Chapters: ‘Chapter’, in I. Editor (ed.) Book title. Publisher, pp. 34–57.
• Journals: volume(issue), pp. 125–139, with full page numbers.
• Online: “Available at:” and the DOI as an https://doi.org/ link with no access date, or the URL followed by (Accessed: 3 October 2026).
• In text: (Surname, Year), (Surname, Year, p. 5) or Surname (Year, p. 5); two or three authors joined with “and”.

Sources: Cite Them Right (Pears and Shields, Bloomsbury; 13th edition) as presented in the Brunel University London Harvard guide, the University of Westminster Harvard guide and the Open University quick guide. Cite Them Right Online itself is a subscription service.

Why Harvard references differ between universities

There is no single official Harvard manual. Cite Them Right is widely used in UK higher education, but many institutions publish their own, and even guides based on Cite Them Right differ in small ways — for example “2nd ed.” or “2nd edn”, a space in “46 (12)”, or naming every author rather than using et al. in the reference list. Your module handbook always wins: set the switches to match it, and keep the same choices for the whole list.

Limitations

• Cite Them Right covers far more source types (legal sources, images, social media, lectures, personal communications) than this generator; adjust those by hand.
• University variants differ in more ways than the switches cover, such as “[Online]” labels or brackets around the whole date; check your handbook.
• Autofill copies publisher and catalogue records, which can be incomplete, and splits names given in one piece into family and given names (check compound surnames such as García Márquez). Sentence case cannot recognise every proper noun, so re-capitalise names after converting a title.
• Some DOI agencies (for example Japan Link Center) refuse lookups from a web page, and many news sites block automated requests.

Privacy

Everything you type stays in your browser except the autofill box: a DOI goes to doi.org (and the agency it forwards to), an ISBN to Open Library, and a web address to MySmartCoPilot’s server, which reads that page and returns only its citation details — neither the page nor the web address is stored. Your reference list is kept only in this page, never uploaded, and is gone when you reload or leave it.