Harvard referencing generator

Harvard is an author-date style used across UK and Australian universities, in most subjects. There is no single official version: universities publish their own guides, and many follow Cite Them Right.

This generator follows Cite Them Right. In the text you give the author's surname and the year, and the reference list at the end is in alphabetical order by first author. If your university has its own Harvard guide, check the details against it.

Reference list entry

In-text citation

(Poropat, 2009)

When you quote, add the page after the year: (Poropat, 2009, p. 330). With two or three authors, join the last two with and: (Smith and Jones, 2020). With four or more, give the first author and et al.

The generator looks works up in Crossref and OpenAlex, two large indexes of published research. Journal articles and conference papers with a DOI are covered best.

Websites, most books without a DOI, reports, theses and very new work are often missing, or have thin records. For those, choose “Enter details manually” and type the details from the source itself.

Index records can be wrong or incomplete: a missing issue number, a title in capitals, an author's name spelled another way. Check each citation against the source before you hand it in.

Is the citation generator free?

Yes. You don't need an account. If you send a lot of searches in a few minutes, the tool asks you to wait a moment before the next one.

Do you store what I search for?

No. Your search goes to our server, which looks it up in Crossref and OpenAlex and sends the citations back to your browser. We don't save the search or the results.

Does it use AI?

No. It doesn't use a language model. It takes the published record for the work and formats it with standard Citation Style Language (CSL) style files, the same kind many reference managers use.

Why can't it find my source?

Crossref and OpenAlex cover journal articles well, but websites, many books, reports, theses and very recent work are often missing. Try the DOI if the work has one, or add an author's surname to the title. If it still isn't found, choose “Enter details manually” and type its author, date, title and the other details from the source.

Which version of Harvard does it follow?

Cite Them Right, a Harvard guide many UK universities use. Other Harvard guides differ in small details, such as punctuation and where the year goes, so check yours.

How is Harvard different from APA?

Both put the author and year in the text. In the reference list, Cite Them Right puts the year in brackets with no full stop after it, puts article titles in single quotation marks, joins the last two authors with and, and writes Available at: before the link.