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Basic points of the Harvard style

There are two parts to referencing using the Harvard System:

  1. Citing in the text of your work- this means acknowledging, within your text, the sources that you have used.
  2. The Reference List - this is the list of sources you have used. It is one list in alphabetical order (A-Z order). You will write it at the end of your work. It is not counted in the word count for your assignment. References are detailed descriptions of the sources from which you acquired your information.

A key piece of information is the name of the person who created your source of information. This could be the person who wrote a book or article, the person who took a photograph, the person who drew a graph, etc. The most common things you should be using are written sources, so we will use the label “author” (writer) to stand for any creator. There can also be “corporate” authors- institutions such as companies, charities, government departments, etc.

Help is available from

Books on referencing, for example:

Neville, C. (2010) The complete guide to referencing and avoiding plagiarism. 2nd edition. Open University Press.

Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2013) Cite them right: the essential referencing guide. 9th edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

EndNote®

This is a program designed to help you format and organise your references, and add citations and references automatically to Word documents. For information about how to obtain and use EndNote, see the library's EndNote pages.

Please use the Output Style: Harvard (Brad), because this matches the University of Bradford guidelinesIf you do not see this in your choice of styles, try logging in to Endnote Online on campus. If this does not work, speak to your subject librarian.

If you add items to your EndNote library by uploading them from Summon or a database, they should have all the pieces of information needed to create a correct citation and reference. If you need to manually create records in EndNote, you will need to choose what sort of item you are using so that EndNote will give you the correct fields to fill in. There is a note by each kind of reference in this document telling you which Reference Type to use for it in EndNote.

The field to enter the web address of any online source in an EndNote record is called URL.

Sometimes you will need to correct the output of EndNote by manually editing it. See the manually editing EndNote section on how to do this.