Harvard referencing, Cite Them Right

Harvard is an author-date style: a short citation in your text points to a full reference at the end. There’s no single official version, so this guide follows Cite Them Right (13th edition, 2025), by Richard Pears and Graham Shields. It’s the Harvard many UK universities teach, and it’s the version Peel formats. Cite Them Right is updated every few years, so check which edition your course uses.

The references on this page were made by Peel’s own formatter, so they match what it pastes. If your course handbook shows something different, follow your handbook.

In-text citations

Cite a source each time you use its ideas, facts or words. A Harvard citation has two parts: the author’s surname and the year.

• If the name is part of your sentence, only the year goes in brackets: “Kahneman (2011) argues that…”.
• If it isn’t, both go in brackets, usually at the end of the sentence, before the full stop.

Smith and Jones are made-up names that show the pattern.

One, two or three authors

Name every author, in the order the source gives them. Join the last two with “and”, not “&”: (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

Four or more authors: et al.

For four or more authors, give the first author’s surname, then et al., which means “and others”: (Kahneman et al., 2004). Cite Them Right puts it in italics.

Cite Them Right allows et al. in the reference list too, and that’s what Peel does. Some universities want every author’s name in the reference list instead, so check your handbook.

No person named, or no date

If no person is named, the organisation responsible for it is the author: (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, 2019). If there’s no organisation either, use the title in its place.

If there’s no date, write “no date” where the year would go: (McLeod, no date). Look carefully first: a web page’s date is often at the top or the very bottom.

Page numbers and quotes

Add the page when you quote, or when you point to one part of a long source: (Kahneman, 2011, p. 81). Use “p.” for one page and “pp.” for a range of pages.

Short quotes go in quotation marks, inside your sentence. Longer quotes go in their own indented paragraph, without quotation marks. Your handbook says how long counts as a long quote.

Two or more sources at once

Put them in one pair of brackets, with a semicolon between them: (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Kahneman, 2011).

Same author, same year

Add a lower-case letter after the year, in the citation and in the reference list: (Smith, 2020a) and (Smith, 2020b). That way each citation points to one reference.

A source you read about in another source

This is called secondary referencing. Name the original, then the source where you read about it: “Smith (1995, cited in Jones, 2020) found that…”. Use “quoted in” instead of “cited in” when you use the original’s exact words.

Only Jones, the source you read, goes in your reference list. If you can, find and read the original instead.

The reference list

Every source you cite goes in a reference list at the end of your work, headed “Reference list” or “References”, as your handbook asks.

• Order: A to Z by the first author’s surname, or by the organisation’s name. Two sources by the same author go oldest first.
• Names: surname first, then initials: Kahneman, D.
• Italics: the title of anything that stands on its own, like a book, report, web page or video. The names of journals and newspapers go in italics too. Titles of articles and chapters go in single quotation marks instead.
• Capital letters: titles of books, chapters and articles start with a capital, and names keep theirs. Other words usually start with a small letter: Thinking, fast and slow. Journal names keep their capitals: Psychological Review.
• Online sources: add “Available at:” and the link. For a web link, add the date you looked at it, like (Accessed: 20 October 2026). A DOI link doesn’t need that date.
• Layout: each reference starts on a new line. Many handbooks want a hanging indent, with the lines after the first pushed in. Peel pastes them that way.

Here’s each kind of source, with a pattern (the placeholder words show where each detail goes) and a real example.

Not shown here: lectures you went to in person, theses, datasets and standards. For those, check Cite Them Right or your library’s Harvard guide.

A full reference list

Here’s the reference list Peel copies for five sources. It’s A to Z by surname, whatever order you cited them in.

• Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) ‘Using thematic analysis in psychology’, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), pp. 77–101. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa.
• Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. Allen Lane.
• McLeod, S. (no date) Working memory model. Available at: https://www.simplypsychology.org/working-memory.html (Accessed: 20 October 2026).
• Miller, G.A. (1956) ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information’, Psychological Review, 63(2), pp. 81–97. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158.
• National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2019) Hypertension in adults: diagnosis and management. NICE guideline NG136. Available at: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng136 (Accessed: 20 October 2026).

Harvard isn’t the same everywhere

Harvard is a family of styles, not one rulebook. Many universities publish their own version, and the small things change: brackets round the year, a space after “p.”, a colon before the page, et al. or every name in the reference list.

Here’s the same citation, for page 1777 of the five-author article, in four versions Peel has:

None of these is wrong. What matters is that you use the version your course asks for, the same way every time. See Harvard referencing for your university for the 35 university versions Peel has checked against their guides.

Common mistakes

• Using “&”. Cite Them Right uses “and”: (Braun and Clarke, 2006).
• Et al. too early. Name all three authors when there are three. Et al. starts at four.
• First names in the citation. Write (Kahneman, 2011), not (Daniel Kahneman, 2011).
• A quote with no page. Every quote needs its page number.
• Listing a source you didn’t read. With secondary referencing, only the source you read goes in the reference list.
• A list in the order you cited. The reference list goes A to Z by surname, not in order of use.
• Mixing versions. Examples from another university’s guide can differ in small ways. Stick to one version.

To keep your references in order while you work, see how to reference as you go. For a dissertation, track which sources each chapter uses, so nothing goes missing from the reference list.