Harvard Citation Generator

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Paste a DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN and get a Harvard reference with its in-text citation, in the Cite Them Right style most UK universities base their guides on. Journal articles, books, book chapters and conference papers are all built from the publisher's record.

How to create a Harvard reference

Step 1

Paste the source

A DOI, PubMed ID, arXiv ID or ISBN, or a link to it. Up to 50, one per line, or upload a .bib, RIS, EndNote or PubMed export.

Step 2

Pick what you need

Harvard is already the style. Single citation gives the reference, Reference list gives the sorted list, In-text citation gives (LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015).

Step 3

Copy

Copy takes one result, Copy all takes the lot. The reference list keeps its italics when pasted into Word or Google Docs.

Harvard referencing examples by source type

Real references from the generator, Cite Them Right 12th edition.

Journal article

LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) ‘Deep learning’, Nature, 521(7553), pp. 436–444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

Book

Kahneman, D. (2012) Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin.

Chapter in an edited book (from a .bib entry)

Rumelhart, D.E., Hinton, G.E. and Williams, R.J. (1988) ‘Learning representations by back-propagating errors’, in J.A. Anderson and E. Rosenfeld (eds.) Neurocomputing: Foundations of research. MIT Press, pp. 696–699.

Conference paper, four or more authors (from a .bib entry)

Vaswani, A. et al. (2017) ‘Attention is all you need’, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 5998–6008.

For a book chapter, look up the book's ISBN, then add the chapter's title, authors, the editors and the chapter's pages: an ISBN identifies the whole book, not a chapter.

Harvard is not one standard: check your guide

There is no official Harvard style. Each university publishes its own version, so two Harvard guides can differ on quotation marks, "and" or "&", and when et al. starts. Cite Them Right (Pears and Shields) is the most common base in the UK, and it is what this generator follows:

Authors: surname and initials, joined with "and". Up to three authors are named; four or more become the first author and et al.
Year in parentheses straight after the authors.
Article and chapter titles in single quotation marks, sentence case. The generator keeps each title as the publisher registered it, so lowercase one that arrives in Title Case, keeping names. Book and journal titles in italics.
Pages with pp. and the full range: pp. 436–444.
DOI after "Available at:", and a full stop at the end.

Compare one generated reference with your module handbook. If they differ, the difference is usually one consistent detail, such as "&" for "and", that you can change across the whole list with find and replace.

Harvard in-text citations

(LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015) or LeCun, Bengio and Hinton (2015)

A comma between author and year, and p. or pp. before a page: (Jordan and Mitchell, 2015, pp. 255–257). With four or more authors: (Vaswani et al., 2017). Type the page in the page box and both forms update.

Frequently asked questions

Which Harvard style is this?

Cite Them Right, 12th edition, the guide most UK universities base theirs on. Because there is no single official Harvard style, check one reference against your university's guide before you hand in.

How do I reference a PDF in Harvard?

Reference what the PDF is, not the file. A journal article PDF has a DOI on its first page: paste it and you get the article reference. A book PDF has an ISBN on its copyright page. A report or web PDF with neither has to be written by hand, with its URL and the date you accessed it.

How do I reference a book chapter in Harvard?

Chapter author (year) 'Chapter title', in editor initials and surname (ed.) Book title. Place: Publisher, pp. range. Paste the book's ISBN for the book details and add the chapter details, as in the example above.

When does et al. start in Harvard?

In Cite Them Right, at four or more authors, in the reference list and in the text. If your guide lists every author, that is the one detail to change by hand.

My guide uses "&" between authors. Can I change it?

Not in the tool. Generate the list, then find and replace " and " with " & " in the author names. It is the most common difference between Harvard versions.

Does the reference list need a hanging indent?

Cite Them Right does not use one, so the list copies without it. If your guide asks for one, set it in your word processor.

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