Citing other Harvard sources?
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Paste an ISBN, book title, or author. Get a clean Harvard reference-list entry with the matching (Author, Year, p. X) in-text citation. Handles editions, editors, translations, and e-books. Free, no signup.
Tip: ISBN is the most reliable input — we'll pull title, authors, publisher, year, and edition automatically.
"Harvard" is an author-date referencing system, not a single official style — different universities publish slightly different guides. What's consistent: the in-text citation is (Author, Year, p. X), and the reference-list entry follows the pattern Author (Year) Title. Edition. Place: Publisher. The generator follows the widely used "Cite Them Right" / Anglia Ruskin Harvard variant; double-check your institution's guide for tiny formatting differences (commas, italics, capitalisation of titles).
Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. London: Penguin.
(Pinker, 2018, p. 47)
Pinker, S. Two authors: Pinker, S. and Mills, J. Three or four: list all. Four or more (most institutional variants): use the first author + et al. in both text and reference list.(2018).2nd edn. Place after the title.London:. State or country only if disambiguation is needed (Cambridge, MA vs Cambridge, UK).Harvard in-text comes in two flavours depending on whether the author's name appears in your sentence. Citing both the author and the year inside parentheses (information prominent): (Pinker, 2018, p. 47). Author in the sentence (author prominent): Pinker (2018, p. 47) argues that…. Use p. for a single page, pp. for a range. Skip the page if you're paraphrasing the whole work rather than a specific passage.
Pinker (2018, p. 47) argues that violence has declined over centuries.
Distinguish them with letters: (Pinker, 2018a, p. 47) and (Pinker, 2018b, p. 12). Match the letter in the reference list, ordering alphabetically by title: Pinker, S. (2018a) Enlightenment now… comes before Pinker, S. (2018b) The better angels of our nature….
For a book you're citing as a whole that has an editor instead of an author: Hahn, D. (ed.) (2015) The Oxford companion to children's literature. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. For a single chapter from an edited book, cite the chapter author and put the editors in the container info: Smith, J. (2017) 'Chapter title', in Hahn, D. (ed.) Book title. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–62.
List the original author and the title in the language you read it in. Include the translator after the title: Eco, U. (1980) The name of the rose. Translated by W. Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg. Year is the year of the edition you used, not the year of original publication (unless you specifically want to emphasize the original date).
For an e-book you accessed online, add the format and URL or DOI at the end: Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment now. London: Penguin. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/… (Accessed: 12 May 2026). For a Kindle or proprietary-format e-book, you can use chapter or section as the locator in the in-text citation since page numbers vary: (Pinker, 2018, ch. 4).
Pinker, S. (2018) not Pinker, S., (2018).Pinker, S. not Pinker, S . or Pinker, S.Paste an ISBN and we pull authors, title, edition, publisher, place, and year from Open Library, Google Books, and WorldCat. The CSL engine renders Harvard formatting — surname + initials, year in brackets, sentence-case title, place:publisher — and gives you the matching in-text citation. We default to the Cite Them Right variant, which most UK and Australian institutions use; tweak the output to match your specific guide if needed.
No. "Harvard" is a family of author-date referencing systems. Different universities and disciplines publish slightly different guides. The core pattern is the same — (Author, Year, p. X) in the text, author/year-first entries in the reference list — but small things like comma placement, italics on the year, and treatment of more than three authors vary. Always check your institution's specific guide before submitting.
If an organisation is the author (a government body, NGO, institute), use that name: (World Health Organization, 2023, p. 14). If genuinely no author, use the title in italics: (Title of book, 2023, p. 14). Don't use "Anonymous" unless that's the formal byline.
Use no date or n.d. in place of the year: (Pinker, no date, p. 47) in the text; Pinker, S. (no date) Title… in the reference list. If the work has an approximate date (a copyright notice, a "circa" estimate), use (c. 2018) instead.
Most Harvard variants use et al. after the first author for four or more in the in-text citation: (Smith et al., 2018, p. 47). Reference list rules vary: some institutions list all authors; some list the first three then et al.; some list the first plus et al. Check your guide.
Yes for direct quotes — always. For paraphrases, page numbers are strongly recommended (your reader should be able to find the passage you're summarising). For referring to a work as a whole, no page number is needed: (Pinker, 2018) on its own is fine.
Cite the chapter author and use the editors in the "in" position: Smith, J. (2017) 'Chapter title', in Hahn, D. (ed.) Book title. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 45–62. In-text, cite the chapter author and the chapter year: (Smith, 2017, p. 50), not the editor.
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