Harvard Citation Generator
Free. No signup. Runs in your browser.
Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, or ISBN and get a Harvard reference back, with the in-text citation alongside it. Author names and dates are read from CrossRef, Europe PMC, arXiv, or OpenLibrary rather than typed in. Upload a .bib, .ris, .enw, or .nbib file to do a set at once. Read the next section before you paste the output into an assignment, because Harvard needs one check the other styles do not.
Harvard is not one standard, so check your department’s guide
APA has a manual. MLA has a handbook. Harvard has neither. There is no central body that publishes an official Harvard style, and universities each maintain their own variant, which is why two Harvard guides from two departments can disagree about punctuation, capitalisation, whether article titles take quotation marks, and whether authors are joined with “and” or an ampersand.
The most widely followed reference point in the UK is Cite Them Right, by Pears and Shields, and a lot of university guides are derived from it with local changes.
What this means in practice: run your sources through this harvard citation generator, then compare one entry against your department’s handbook before you commit. The differences, where they exist, are usually small and consistent. Fix one entry by hand and you will know exactly what to change in the rest, or whether anything needs changing at all.
That is a real limitation and it applies to every Harvard referencing generator, including the ones that do not mention it.
What this Harvard citation generator outputs
So you can compare against your own guide without generating anything first, here is exactly what comes out for a journal article and a book chapter:
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) "Deep learning and the future of machine vision," Nature, 521(7553), pp. 436-444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.
Abe, K. (2021) "A chapter about something," The Big Book of Things. Example Press, pp. 12-40.
The specifics to check against your handbook:
- Authors joined with “and”, not an ampersand
- All authors named. Three authors are spelled out, not shortened to et al. Variants that shorten at four or more will differ here
- Article title in double quotation marks, sentence case
- Journal title in italics, followed by volume and issue as
521(7553) - Pages prefixed
pp.and the full second number kept, so436-444rather than436-44 - DOI introduced by “Available at:” and the entry closed with a full stop
In-text you get both forms: (LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015) for parenthetical and LeCun, Bengio and Hinton (2015) for narrative, with a field for a page number when you are quoting.
If your handbook turns out to want a different style family altogether, the same sources can be output as APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, AMA, or Vancouver from the citation generator without pasting them again.
As a harvard reference generator it works from a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, ISBN, or an uploaded reference file. Harvard guides usually want an access date for web sources, which no lookup can supply, so websites need writing by hand whichever tool you use.
Frequently asked questions
The Harvard style file from the CSL Style Repository, which follows the widely used Cite Them Right pattern. Because there is no official Harvard standard, no generator can match every university guide, so treat the output as a starting point and check one entry against your handbook.
Not in the tool. Generate the list, then find and replace ” and ” with ” & ” in the author position. It is a mechanical change and it is the most common single difference between Harvard variants.
This variant names all authors in the reference and the in-text citation. Some Harvard guides shorten to et al. at four or more. If yours does, that is a find and replace on the in-text citations, and it does not affect the reference list.
Yes, switch the output to a reference list and the entries come back alphabetised by first author surname. Note that this Harvard variant does not apply a hanging indent, unlike APA, so if your guide asks for one you will apply it in your word processor.
You Have a Word or PDF File. We'll Convert it to Submission-Ready LaTeX.
We convert Word documents and PDFs into clean, submission-ready LaTeX for IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, ACM, arXiv, and more. Equations, tables, citations, and journal templates included. Compiled and tested in Overleaf before delivery.
Reviewed by a real LaTeX specialist.