Example of Harvard Reference Style

Introduction

In academic writing, referencing plays an important role as it helps make work easier for researchers and scholars as well as according rights of ownership to the writer. It provides readers with the information of a writer’s source. Referencing gives other researchers a guide to your writing and tells readers how to find the original source of the information you use in your work. In general terms referencing is the act of mentioning something in a writing or in a speech.

What is a Harvard Reference Style?

In academic writing, the Harvard referencing style is the most common referencing style for academic works, used by Universities in the UK. In this style of referencing, an author’s name and year of publication are cited in-text and a full detail/list of materials used by a writer at the end of his work.

The name of this list is called the reference writing list. When using a Harvard style referencing style, the first thing to take note of is the brackets which appear by the side, usually at the end of any quotation a writer chooses to use or a paraphrase of the chosen quotation, followed by an author’s first name, the year of publication and the exact page number in which that particular quotation is gotten from.

Be it a book or a journal. When using a quote from just one page, a writer must use a single “p” to indicate a page, while if a quotation carries more than one page of references, a writer should indicate the multiple pages using “pp”.

Example of Harvard Referencing Style

The Harvard referencing style requires that whatever quotation a writer chooses to use (be it verbatim or paraphrased) must come first before the author is acknowledged by affixing the name, year and page from which the quotation is lifted.

An example of using a Harvard referencing style for an in-text citation is as thus; In the art of writing, every writer must ensure to give credit to an original author, so long as an idea or concept is borrowed (Allen, 2020, p.8). A multiple page citation for the Harvard referencing style can be written in this form; (‘pp. 28-32’).

In the Harvard referencing style, when an author’s name is already mentioned in a prior sentence, an academic writer has to be sure to not include an author’s name again in the citation. An example of such is, Allen stated in his work, The Writer’s Credit, that in the art of writing, every writer must ensure to give credit to an original author, so long as an idea or concept is borrowed (2020, p.8).

For a citation with multiple authors, a writer can cite the first names of a quotation with up to three authors. Work with up to four authors and above can bear the first name of one of the authors followed by the word ‘et al.’. It is equally important to note that when citing the work of multiple authors, a writer must mention the authors’ names when citing them for the first time in the writing.

If there is a need to cite the same authors again, a writer can use the word ‘et al’. This rule stands because readers of your work are not expected to speculate the authors of your references by merely seeing or identifying the first name of just one of the authors.

How to cite works without page numbers -Harvard Reference Style

Citing a work not found on a book or a journal can be tricky if one does not know how. Websites or even blog posts do not carry any page numbers. The way to cite this quotation without page numbers is by stating a quote and fixing the author’s first name and date of publication on the side of the quotation or paraphrasing, for example, (Allen, para.2).

Example of How to write a Harvard reference list

A reference list comes at the end of a work, it is a collection of an author’s research aid. The format is as thus; Allen, D. (2020) Writer’s Credit, Edited by Winskinson, Cambridge University Press.
In conclusion, the Harvard referencing style is quite easy to emulate if closely examined.

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