What if there is no date or more than one publication year given?
If in doubt use the copyright © date. If there is no date use (n.d.) in its place. n.d. stands for no date.
What if there is no obvious author for an item on the Web?
You can use the organisation whose website it is as the corporate author. If there is no author and it is not a site belonging to an organisation - should you be using the information?
What is the difference between a bibliography and a reference list?
A reference list is a list of all the sources you have cited from. A bibliography is a list of items you have read but not cited.
What should I do if there is more than one place of publication given?
Use only the first named place, or the one which corresponds to the copyright date.
If an author has more than one family name, do I need to write both of them?
Yes, if there is a hyphen between the names. These names must be written as they are published. Example: Stein-Parbury, J.
Can I use footnotes at all in the Harvard System?
Footnotes can be used to provide extra information, but must not be used to provide the reference to the source of the material.
I don't know what I should cite, and what I can leave out of my reference list.
Cite: a direct quotation; a paraphrase; someone else's idea or theory; the result of someone else's research; statistical information collected by someone else; a statement of law or fact; a definition. Don't cite: a concrete fact easily verifiable in a reference book; knowledge which is so generally available as to be taken for granted in any general reader (common knowledge); your own idea or theory; a result of your own empirical research; the result of a survey you have personally conducted; anything I have read but not used in my work.
How can I cite sources written in the same year by the same author(s)?
If two or more sources have the same author(s) and are from the same year, they should be distinguished by adding a lower-case letter after the year (a, b, c, etc.).
Example:
It was emphasized that citations in a text should be consistent (Jones, 1998a). In a work published later that year, Jones (1998b) proposed that...
If you want to make a single reference to multiple sources from the same year by the same author, you can cite the sources together using lower-case letters.
Example:
It was emphasised that citations in a text should be consistent (Jones, 1998a; Jones, 1998b).
How can I cite sources written by the same author(s) in different years?
Include the surname and the oldest year first, then separate the other years by semicolons (;). The sources should be ordered by year of publication, with the oldest first.
Example:(Smith, 2011; 2015; 2021)
You must include all of the sources separately in your reference list or bibliography.
How can I cite sources written by two authors with the same surname in the same year?
If two or more sources have authors with the same surname and were written in the same year, they should be distinguished by including the authors' initials in the relevant citations.
Example:
It was emphasized that citations in a text should be consistent (R.F. Smith, 2021). In an article published later that year, C.B. Smith (2021) proposed that...
