This guide offers advice on using the Harvard referencing style, which is an author-date style, 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.
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 style 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.