Parenthetical referencing

Harvard referencing is a format for writing and organizing citations of source materials. It is also known as the Harvard system, author-date system, and parenthetical referencing.

Under Harvard referencing, a brief citation to a source is given in parentheses within the text of an article, and full citations are collected in alphabetical order under a "References" or "Works Cited" heading at the end. The citation in the text is placed in parentheses after the sentence or part thereof, followed by the year of publication, as in (Smith 2005), and a page number where appropriate (Smith 2005, p. 1) or (Smith 2005:1). Then in a References section, a full citation is given:

Smith, John. (2005). Playing nicely together. St. Petersberg, FL (USA): Wikimedia Foundation.

Harvard referencing is the preferred style of the British Standards Institution, the American Psychological Association (APA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA). It is one of several systems recommended by the Council of Science Editors and the Chicago Manual of Style.

Origins

According to an 1896 paper on bibliography by Charles Sedgwick Minot of the Harvard Medical School, the origin of Harvard referencing is attributed to a paper by Edward Laurens Mark, Hersey professor of anatomy and director of the zoological laboratory at Harvard University, who may have copied it from the cataloguing system used then and now by the library of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1881, Mark wrote a paper on the embryogenesis of the garden slug, in which he included an author-date citation in parentheses on page 194, the first known instance of such a reference. Until then, according to Eli Chernin writing in the British Medical Journal, references had appeared in inconsistent styles in footnotes, referred to in the text using a variety of printers' symbols, including asterisks and daggers.

Chernin writes that a 1903 festschrift dedicated to Mark by 140 students, including Theodore Roosevelt, confirms that Harvard referencing is attributable to Mark. The festschrift pays tribute to Mark's 1881 paper, writing that it "introduced into zoology a proper fullness and accuracy of citation and a convenient and uniform method of referring from text to bibliography."

According to an editorial note in the British Medical Journal in 1945, an unconfirmed anecdote is that the term "Harvard system" was introduced by an English visitor to Harvard University library, who was impressed by the citation system, and dubbed it "Harvard system" upon his return to England.

Uses

Harvard is used mostly in the sciences and social sciences, with the first version of the APA style guide published as early as 1929.

A similar type of referencing, known variously as the author-number, citation-sequence, or Vancouver style, has been used by British medical journals and the U.S. Council of Biology Editors (now Council of Science Editors). Scholars in the fine arts and humanities have traditionally preferred to use a "documentary-note" system. During the 1980s though, ease of referencing began to win out over tradition and in-text citations began to appear in the humanities, in the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook. In recent decades, most scholarly and professional organizations have adopted Harvard referencing.

How works are cited

The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the author's surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Smith example near the top of this article.

• The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The author's surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say: "Jones (2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery."

• Two or three authors are cited using "and" or "&": (Deane, Smith, and Jones, 1991) or (Deane, Smith & Jones, 1991). Six or more authors are cited using et al. (Deane et al. 1992).

• An unknown date is cited as no date (Deane n.d.). A reference to a reprint is cited with the original publication date in square brackets (Marx [1867] 1967, p. 90).

• If an author published two books in 2005, the year of the first (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b.

• A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself.

• Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as "Works cited" or "References." The difference between a "works cited" or "references" list and a bibliography is that a bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.

• All citations are in the same font as the main text.

Examples

Examples of book references are:

• Smith, J. (2005a). Harvard Referencing. London: Jolly Good Publishing.
• Smith, J. (2005b). Dutch Citing Practices. The Hague: Holland Research Foundation.

In giving the city of publication, an internationally well-known city (such as London, The Hague, or New York) is referenced as the city alone. If the city is not internationally well known, the country (or state and country if in the U.S.) are given.

An example of a journal reference is:

• Smith, John Maynard. (1998). The origin of altruism. Nature 393: 639–40.

A newspaper article is usually cited in running text and omitted from the References section. An example of a formal newspaper reference is:

• Bowcott, O. (2005, 18 October). "Protests halt online auction to shoot stag", The Guardian. Accessed 7 Feb 06.

If the publication is offline:

• Bowcott, O. (2005, 18 October). Protests halt online auction to shoot stag. The Guardian.

Content notes

A content note generally contains information and explanations that do not fit into the primary text itself, but are useful for giving additional points of explanation about information in the text or information being referred to. Content notes are generally given as footnotes or endnotes. These content notes may also contain Harvard referencing, just as the main text does.

Further reading

• MIT. 2006. "Citing sources and listing references", in The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing.
• Comparison of reference management software
• Turabian, Kate L. (1996). A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. 6th edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-81627-3
• Curtin University, 2007, "Harvard referencing guide" (with usage examples).
• UCE Birmingham, 2007, "Essential Harvard Referencing" (with usage examples for different types of sources).