Citing and referencing: Harvard

This guide offers advice on using the Harvard referencing style, which is a general author-date referencing system of which there are many versions.  The Harvard style used at Monash University is based on the Australian Government’s Style Manual, referred to throughout this document as the Style Manual.  The Style Manual was updated in 2020 and is available online.  The 2020 Style Manual contains a number of major changes compared with the 2002 Style Manual which Monash previously based the Harvard style on.  The major changes that have been incorporated into this Harvard citing and referencing guide are:

• In the reference list, parentheses are now used to separate the year, rather than commas
• The word 'and' is always used to separate authors, the symbol '&' is never used
• Page numbers are only required for direct quotes, not for summaries or paraphrases, although advice is included that there may be different requirements depending on the discipline

Two of the main reasons why we use referencing styles are to acknowledge our sources and to give readers the information they need to find the sources for themselves. This requires two elements: citations and a reference list. In an author-date referencing system such as Harvard, citations within the text include the author’s surname and the publication year. Each in-text citation has a corresponding entry in the reference list. The reference list entries include the author’s name and the publication year, the title, and the publication details. More guidance and examples related to Harvard citations and references are included in the following pages of this guide.