BibTeX to Harvard Converter
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste or upload a .bib file and get a Harvard reference list in the Cite Them Right style, sorted by author. Copy it into Word or Google Docs and the italics come with it.
How to convert BibTeX to Harvard
Step 1
Add your BibTeX
Use Upload file, drop the .bib on the box, or paste the entries.
Step 2
Convert
Harvard is already selected on this page.
Step 3
Copy
Copy all puts the reference list on your clipboard, formatted. A download saves it as plain text.
Your .bib is read and formatted in your browser, never on our server.
Which Harvard is this?
"Harvard" is a family of author-date styles, and many universities publish their own version. This converter follows Cite Them Right, 12th edition, the Harvard guide most UK universities use:
Zeta, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) 'Deep learning', Nature, 521(7553), pp. 436–444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.
- Authors: surname and initials. Up to three are listed; with four or more, the first author and "et al."
- Year in brackets after the authors.
- Article titles in single quotation marks, journals and books in italics.
- DOIs after "Available at:".
If your university's guide differs (a comma before the year, "Retrieved from", full first names), use this list as the base and adjust those details; the order and fields will already be right.
Check these before you use the list
- Title capitals. Cite Them Right keeps titles as published; they come out as written in your .bib.
- In-text citations look like (Zeta, Bengio and Hinton, 2015). The Harvard citation generator gives them for each source.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. With biblatex, \usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex} gives a Harvard-like author-date style; with natbib, \bibliographystyle{agsm}. Neither matches Cite Them Right exactly, which is when a converted list helps.
If an entry has a syntax error, the result lists it with its line number and reason, and the other entries still convert.
It is free and needs no signup. Your .bib is read in your browser and never sent to our server.
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