Harvard Referencing Generator
Harvard author–date referencing, flexible enough for most UK and Commonwealth universities, with BibTeX export.
Input
Source Details
Fill what you have, leave blank what you don't
Separate authors with semicolons.
Output
Harvard Citation
Copy-ready citation in your chosen style
Output
BibTeX Equivalent
LaTeX-ready, paste into your .bib file
Need to find sources for your draft?
Underleaf's AI citation finder reads a paragraph of your paper and surfaces relevant arXiv papers with BibTeX entries ready to use.
What is Harvard?
Harvard referencing is an author–date citation style used widely across UK, Australian, and Commonwealth universities, and in many business, economics, and natural-sciences contexts globally. Unlike APA or Chicago, Harvard is not centrally maintained by any one organization, so its formatting varies slightly between institutions. This generator follows the widely-accepted Cite Them Right Harvard variant.
Who uses Harvard?
Harvard is the default style at most UK universities outside of history and English departments. It's also common in business schools globally, in some natural-science journals (especially in ecology and earth science), and in many Australian university programs. Always check your institution's style guide, there are minor punctuation differences between variants.
For instructors & researchers
UK and Commonwealth faculty: students often confuse Harvard with APA because both use author–date. This generator outputs the Cite Them Right Harvard convention (italicized titles for books, single quotes for articles, "Available at" for URLs). Hand it to your first-year cohort and reduce the "is this APA or Harvard?" questions during office hours.
Harvard examples by source type
Book
Hawking, S. (1988) *A brief history of time.* London: Bantam Press.
Journal article
Stern, N. (2006) 'The economics of climate change', *Review of Economic Statistics*, 88(2), pp. 405-431.
Edited book chapter
Sen, A. (1999) 'Development as capability expansion', in Fukuda-Parr, S. and Kumar, A. (eds.) *Readings in human development.* Oxford: OUP, pp. 41-58.
Website
UK Government (2024) 'Higher education statistics'. Available at: gov.uk/higher-education-data (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Harvard citation questions
Is Harvard the same as APA?
No. They look similar (both are author–date) but differ in details: Harvard uses single quotes around article titles, no comma between author and year in some variants, and different rules for URLs.
Which Harvard variant does this follow?
This generator follows the Cite Them Right Harvard style, the most widely used variant in UK universities. If your school uses a slightly different variant, the output should be a few formatting tweaks away.
How do I add page numbers for in-text quotes?
Use (Author, Year, p. X) for a single page or (Author, Year, pp. X–Y) for a range. The generator output is the reference-list entry, you compose the in-text citation manually.
Does Harvard need an accessed date for websites?
Yes, in most Harvard variants. The output includes 'Accessed' for websites, change the date to match when you last viewed the page.
Related citation tools
Try our citation style hub, BibTeX generator, DOI → BibTeX, or find citations with AI.
Explore More Tools
Try more tools for free
Create an account to unlock all features
More file conversions
AI writing tools
PDF preview
100% free to try