Citing your references using the Harvard (Author-Date) system

Is this the correct guide for you?

Before using this guide, please check whether your Department, School or Faculty specifies the use of a particular referencing system and, if so, if it provides its own guidelines to that system.

Note that some Departments,Schools or Faculties may expect both a list of (cited) references and a (general) bibliography, rather than one single reference list/bibliography.

Why is it important to cite references?

• It is accepted practice in the academic world to acknowledge the words, ideas or work of others and not simply to use them as if they were your own. Failure to do this could be regarded as plagiarism - see http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/skill/plagiarism.html

• to enable other people to identify and trace your sources quickly and easily

• to support facts and claims you have made in your text

1. In-text citations

The in-text citation is placed at the exact point in your document where you refer to someone else’s work, whether it is a book, journal, online document, website or any other source.

It consists of author (or editor/compiler/translator) and publication year, in brackets:

eg Agriculture still employs half a million people in rural Britain (Shucksmith, 2000).

An author can be an organisation or Government Department (common with websites):

eg (English Heritage, 2010)

If there are 2 authors, both names should be given:

eg (Lines and Walker, 2007)

If there are more than 2 authors, cite the first author, followed by ‘et al’ (in italics)

eg (Morgan et al., 1998)

For several documents by the same author published in the same year, use (a,b,c):

eg (Watson, 2009a)

If the author’s name occurs naturally in the sentence, only the year of publication is