LibGuides: Referencing and Plagiarism: Harvard style

Introduction

Every scholarly discipline has a preferred format or style of referencing their publications. This guide outlines a widely accepted form used in the business and social fields called the Harvard, or author-date system.

The Harvard system is made up of 3 components :

Citation- provides brief details of the author and date of publication for referencing the work in the body of the text.
Reference list- an alphabetical list at the end of the essay or assignment of all references cited in your work with additional details provided to identify each source.
Bibliography- a more comprehensive list of sources used to research your assigment, including those not cited within the text. Documents are referenced in the same way as in a reference list.

Citation

A citation should be used within the text of your work if you:

use a direct quote from someone else's work
summarise or paraphrase someone else's work

Details provided are brief and include the author's surname, the year of publication and the page number.

e.g. According to Reilly (2006, p. 66) theories are tested by sample statistics.

Punctuation is an important part of the style and should be consistent throughout

Examples below :

BOOKS

Reilly, J. (2006) Using Statistics. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.

PRINT JOURNAL ARTICLE

Randler, C. (2010) 'The early bird really does get the worm' , Harvard Business Review, 88 (7/8), pp. 30-31.

GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS

Ireland. Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (2009) Future Skills Requirements of the Food and Beverage Sector. Dublin: Forfas.

THESES

Guy, P. D. (2009) As Mirrors are lonely: a lacanian reading of three Irish novelists. Unpublished PhD thesis. Tallaght Institute of Technology.

Electronic sources can include web pages, online journals, cd-roms, email etc. It can be quite difficult to reference these sources as the details provided can vary dramatically but as many of the following as possible should be included:

Name of author or editor
Title of the page (look in the bar at the top of your browser)
Title of the site (go to the sites homepage)
Date page, last update or copyright date
The full URL of the web page
The date you accessed the page
Any other details that might help someone find the page

Examples of citing electronic literature in the Harvard style :

WEB SITE

MABS (2010) A Guide to Managing your Money and Dealing with Debt. Available at http://www.mabs.ie/publications/leaflets/managing_money.pdf (Accessed: 07 October 2010)

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Myers, M.P., Yang, J. & Stampe, P. (1999) 'Visualization and functional analysis of a maxi-K channel (mSlo) fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP)', EJB: Electronic Journal of Biotechnology, vol. 2, no. 3, [Online]. Available at: http://www.ejb.org/content/vol2/issue3/full/3/index.html (Accessed 21 May 2002).