Harvard referencing is the most-used citation system in UK higher education and the least standardised. There is no single Harvard authority, no governing body and no definitive manual — which is why the guide your friend at another university swears by can be confidently, markably wrong for your department. This guide gives you the version most UK departments actually mean, the changes that landed in 2025 and now bind you in 2026, and a procedure you can follow chapter by chapter.
One instruction before any of it: find your own module handbook or library referencing guide and keep it open. Everything below tells you what is normal and where the variation lives. Your handbook tells you what is required.
Step 1: Work out which Harvard you have been asked for
Most UK departments that say “Harvard” mean Cite Them Right, the author–date guide by Richard Pears and Graham Shields published by Bloomsbury, now in its 13th edition. Cite Them Right Online states that its referencing styles reflect the latest guidance from that 13th edition, and a large share of UK university libraries subscribe to it and point students straight there.
But a substantial minority of universities maintain their own named variant. The University of Leeds says so directly: “The University uses a variation of the Harvard referencing style called Leeds Harvard.” Anglia Ruskin, Coventry, Bath and others publish their own house Harvards too. These are not cosmetic differences — they change punctuation, capitalisation, the order of elements and whether an accessed date is required.
Expected output: one sentence you can say out loud — “my department uses Cite Them Right Harvard” or “my department uses [University] Harvard” — plus the URL of the guide that proves it. If your handbook only says “Harvard”, ask your supervisor in writing which guide the markers use, because the answer determines everything that follows.
Step 2: Learn the four changes the 13th edition made
This is the step almost nobody does, and it is the reason so much online Harvard advice is now out of date. The 13th edition changed conventions that had been stable for years, so a template you copied from a blog in 2023 will produce references that look wrong to a marker reading in 2026.
UK university libraries have published the differences; the Open University Library set them out plainly in October 2025:
- Place of publication has been removed from citations to most source types, including books, films and maps. The old London: Routledge pattern is gone; it is now just the publisher.
- Paragraph numbers may be included in in-text citations where they help — optional, and useful for sources with no page numbers.
- Capitalisation has split. Use title case for titles of works when you mention them in your running text, and sentence case for titles in the reference list. Previous advice was to reproduce the title as given.
- New source types were added, including guidance on AI-generated material and on working with AI tools as part of an assignment.
The transition matters as much as the changes. The University of the Highlands and Islands library told its students that academics will accept both the 12th and 13th edition styles during the 2025/26 academic year, that nobody would be penalised for either “provided their referencing is clear, accurate, and consistent” — and that from 2026/27 onwards all students will be expected to follow the 13th edition. Other institutions have set their own switchover dates. If you are submitting a dissertation in the 2026/27 session, assume 13th edition unless your handbook says otherwise.
Expected output: a decision recorded at the top of your notes — 12th or 13th edition — and consistency with it across every entry. Mixing the two is the failure markers actually penalise.
Step 3: Get the in-text citation right, because it is most of the work
Harvard is an author–date system: the citation in your text carries the surname and the year, and the reference list carries everything else. Three patterns cover nearly every sentence you will write.
Citation in brackets, when the source is doing the work and the author is not the subject of your sentence: Attendance and attainment appear to be linked (Stone and Collins, 2012).
Author in the sentence, when you want to foreground whose claim it is: Biggs and Smith (2012) argue that constructive alignment changes what assessment measures. This is the more analytical construction and undergraduate dissertations generally use it too little.
Several sources at once, when you are establishing that a position is well supported: (Richards, 2007; Graham, 2009; Elston, 2011; Chan, 2012).
Add a page number whenever you quote directly, and whenever you attribute a specific claim to a specific place in a long work. Leeds Harvard puts the rule simply: include page numbers in your citation if you quote directly from the text.
The multiple-author rule is where students most often guess. For Cite Them Right Harvard, Newcastle University Library states it precisely: use et al. in the in-text citation where the reference has four or more authors, and in the reference list record all authors, using et al. only where there are ten or more. Note that these are two different thresholds for two different places, and that the threshold is exactly the sort of thing a local variant may change.
Expected output: a rule you can apply without looking anything up — brackets or sentence, page number if quoting, et al. at your guide’s stated threshold.
Step 4: Build the reference list from four patterns
Almost everything you cite is a book, a chapter in an edited book, a journal article or a webpage. Learn these four shapes and the rest are variations. The examples below follow Cite Them Right conventions as published in UK university library guides.
| Source type | Pattern |
|---|---|
| Book | Author, Initial(s). (Year) Title in sentence case. Edition. Publisher. |
| Chapter in an edited book | Author, Initial(s). (Year) ‘Chapter title’, in Editor (ed.) Book title. Publisher, pp. x–y. |
| Journal article | Author, Initial(s). (Year) ‘Article title’, Journal Name, volume(issue), pp. x–y. DOI or URL. |
| Webpage | Author or organisation (Year) Title. Available at: URL (Accessed: day month year). |
Worked out in full, using the examples published by the University of the West of Scotland’s library guide:
Book: Speight, J.G. (2019) Global climate change demystified. 2nd edn. Wiley.
Chapter: Venn, A. (2019) ‘Social justice and climate change’, in T. M. Letcher (ed.) Managing global warming: an interface of technology and human issues. Academic Press, pp. 711–728.
Journal article: Culloty, E., Murphy, P., Brereton, P., Suiter, J., Smeaton, A. and Zhang, D. (2019) ‘Researching visual representations of climate change’, Environmental Communication, 13(2), pp. 179–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1533877
Webpage: Sneed, A. (2019) The reason Antarctica is melting: shifting winds, driven by global warming. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-reason-antarctica-is-melting-shifting-winds-driven-by-global-warming/ (Accessed: 23 July 2020).
Read the book example again and notice what is absent: no place of publication. That single omission is the fastest way to tell whether a reference was written to the current edition or copied from an old template.
Four details carry most of the marks that get lost here. The article title takes quotation marks and the journal title takes italics — not the other way round, which is the single most common inversion. Page ranges are given in full, not truncated to the first page. A DOI is preferred to a bare URL where one exists, because it does not rot. And an accessed date belongs on web sources whose content can change, not on a journal article with a DOI.
Expected output: a reference list in one alphabetical sequence by author surname, with no numbering, no bullet points, and no separate sections for books and websites unless your handbook asks for them.
Step 5: Handle the four sources that break the pattern
A source with no author. Use the organisation as author where there is one. Where there is genuinely none, the title takes the author position — do not write “Anon.” unless your guide tells you to.
A source with no date. Use (no date). Do not guess a year from a copyright footer; a website’s footer year is the year the site was updated, not the year the page was written.
A source you found quoted in another source. This is secondary referencing, and the honest form names both: Bourdieu (1984, cited in Smith, 2019, p. 44), with only the source you actually read — Smith — appearing in the reference list. Markers notice when a dissertation’s reference list is full of classic works the student plainly did not open. If a source matters to your argument, find it and read it.
Generative AI output. The 13th edition added guidance for this, and separately your university will have an assessment rule about whether such use is permitted at all and how to declare it. Referencing an AI output and being allowed to use it are two different questions; answer the permission question from your own academic integrity policy first.
Expected output: no placeholder text anywhere. Every awkward source resolved before submission week, when there is no time to resolve anything.
Step 6: Automate the clerical layer and check the judgement layer
Formatting citations is mechanical work that no marking criterion rewards, and it is the easiest part of a dissertation to hand to software. A reference manager holds your library and inserts formatted citations — our comparison of Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote covers which suits a dissertation-scale project. A generator formats individual entries from a DOI or URL, which our guide to the AI Harvard referencing generator works through, including the free options.
Two things stay yours whatever you use. Select your institution’s exact variant in the tool’s style list where it exists, and check a sample of the output against your handbook once, early — a tool set to the wrong Harvard produces consistently wrong references, which is worse than inconsistently wrong ones because you stop looking. And verify that every entry corresponds to something you actually opened; a missing or fabricated citation is a misconduct question, not a formatting one, and it is also the kind of gap that surfaces when you run a similarity self-check before submission.
If your bibliography keeps drifting out of step with your chapters, the structural fix is to stop treating it as a separate document. Tesify builds your bibliography from what your text actually cites as you write, in your chosen style, so cited-but-not-listed and listed-but-not-cited stop being possible. Everything stays 100% written by you, and it is free to start.
Expected output: a bibliography that regenerates correctly after every edit, and a twenty-minute manual check against the handbook in your final week rather than a five-hour rebuild.
Step 7: Run the pre-submission referencing pass
Give this an hour, once, when the writing is finished.
- Match the two lists. Every in-text citation appears in the reference list; every reference list entry is cited somewhere in the text. Nothing else on this list catches more marks.
- Check the alphabetical order and that entries beginning with the same surname are ordered by year.
- Check five entries in detail against your handbook — one of each source type. If all five are right, the pattern is right.
- Check the odd sources individually — reports, government publications, theses, translated works, lecture material. This is where automated metadata guesses.
- Confirm what counts towards the word limit. Departments differ sharply on whether in-text citations and the reference list are included, as our survey of undergraduate dissertation word counts found, and the answer changes how much room your chapters actually have.
And one exclusion: if you are writing a law dissertation, most of this page does not apply to you. UK law schools overwhelmingly require footnoted OSCOLA rather than any author–date system, and the workflow is different from the first sentence — start with our OSCOLA guide instead.
Expected output: a reference list you would be comfortable having a marker open at random.
Frequently asked questions
Is there one official Harvard referencing style?
No. Harvard is a family of author–date conventions with no governing body. In the UK most departments mean Cite Them Right, but some universities maintain their own named variant — Leeds, for example, states that it uses “a variation of the Harvard referencing style called Leeds Harvard”. Your library guide is the authority for you.
What is Cite Them Right and which edition is current?
It is the author–date referencing guide by Richard Pears and Graham Shields, published by Bloomsbury, and the current edition is the 13th. Cite Them Right Online states that its styles reflect the latest guidance from that edition.
Do I still include the place of publication for a book?
Not under the 13th edition, which removed place of publication from most source types including books, films and maps. A book reference now ends with the publisher. If your department is still on the 12th edition, keep the place — and either way, be consistent.
When do I use et al.?
In Cite Them Right Harvard, Newcastle University Library states that et al. is used in in-text citations where a reference has four or more authors, while the reference list records all authors and uses et al. only where there are ten or more. Local variants may set different thresholds, so check yours.
Does my reference list count towards my word limit?
It depends entirely on your department, and practice across UK universities genuinely diverges — some count in-text citations, some exclude footnotes and bibliography entirely. Find your own inclusion rule before you allocate words to chapters.
How many references should a dissertation have?
There is no set number, and any figure quoted as a rule is somebody’s estimate. What markers assess is whether the literature you engage with is sufficient and appropriate for the argument you are making.
How do I reference something I read about in another book?
As a secondary reference, naming both: (Bourdieu, 1984, cited in Smith, 2019, p. 44), with only Smith in your reference list because Smith is what you read. Use it sparingly — markers read a long run of secondary citations as evidence the primary sources were never opened.
Is it cheating to use a referencing generator?
No. Formatting punctuation is clerical work and no marking criterion rewards doing it by hand. What integrity requires is that the sources are real, that you used them, and that ideas taken from them are attributed — none of which a generator changes.
What is the difference between a reference list and a bibliography?
A reference list contains only works you cited. A bibliography may also include works you read that informed your thinking without being cited. Most UK dissertations ask for a reference list; check whether yours wants both.
My department says “Harvard” and nothing else. What should I do?
Ask your supervisor which guide the markers use and get the answer in writing, then follow it exactly. Where no answer is forthcoming, use Cite Them Right 13th edition and be rigorously consistent — consistency is the criterion every variant shares.