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  • 3-minute read
  • 14th March 2016

Harvard Referencing – How to Cite a Journal Article

‘Harvard referencing’ (so-called for having originated at Harvard University) refers to citing sources in brackets. It’s also one of the most widely-used citation systems in academic writing, especially in the humanities.

Many variations of the basic Harvard ‘author-date’ system exist, making it important to check your style guide for specifics. Nevertheless, the general format for citing a journal article using Harvard-style referencing is shared by most versions of the system. We’ll look at how this works below.

In-Text Citations for a Journal Article in Harvard Referencing

To cite a journal article, you need to provide the author’s surname and the year of publication (separated by a comma) in parentheses:

The yellow plumage indicates a blue tit’s diet (Couzens, 2010).

If you name the author(s) in the text, only the year of publication is required:

Garfinkel, Lynch and Livingston (1981) rejected traditional objectivity.

Your reader will then be able to find the cited source.

Quoting a Source

When quoting a journal article, you should provide page numbers in your citation, as well as enclosing the quoted text within inverted commas:

Sprachlichkeit is ‘a derived phenomenon’ (Cook, 1986, p. 91).

If you have named the author(s) in the text, give the page number and date of publication in brackets immediately afterwards.

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Reference List: Print Article

You will need to provide full bibliographic detail for all cited sources in a reference list at the end of your document, ordered alphabetically by author surname. The information required for a journal article, for instance, includes the title and details of where it was published:

Author Surname(s), Initial(s). (Year) ‘Article Title’, Full Title of Journal, Volume Number, Issue/Part Number, Page Numbers.

Note that the journal, not the article title, is italicised. The entry for one of the articles cited above would therefore appear as:

Garfinkel, H., Lynch, M. and Livingston, E. (1981) ‘The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 131-58.

Reference List: Online Article

For online journal articles, the reference list must specify the format of the article, the date last accessed and the URL (or DOI) where it can be found:

Author Surname(s), Initial(s). (Year) ‘Title’. Journal Title, Volume, Issue, Page Numbers. [Online]. Available at URL [Accessed Day Month Year].

For example, the online version of the Cook article above would appear as:

Cook, D. (1986). ‘Reflections on Gadamer’s Notion of Sprachlichkeit’, Philosophy and Literature, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 84-92. [Online]. Available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v010/10.1.cook.html [Accessed 21 January 2016].

Hopefully, this has helped you with citing a journal article in your work. And if you’d like someone to check your writing for errors, we’re here to help.

Comments (10)
Jyothis
18th March 2020 at 13:21
when doing an assignment harvard referancing do i need to put et al in italics.Example Lacerda vidal et al...in assignment?/
Reply
    Proofed
    18th March 2020 at 14:31
    Hi there. This will ultimately depend on the version of Harvard referencing you're using and your university's style guide, so make sure to check that, but it isn't usually necessary to italicise common Latin terms like 'et al.' in academic writing.
    Reply
Mohsen Hassanshahi
4th July 2020 at 10:19
How to Cite an Article With an Article Number Instead of a Page Range ?
Reply
    Proofed
    4th July 2020 at 10:46
    Hi, Mohsen. It may depend on the version of Harvard referencing you're using, so you should check your style guide if you have one, but if a journal article doesn't have a page range you can usually just leave this out (assuming it is an online article, you will have a link to it anyway, so the page range isn't hugely important). And if you need to give a pinpoint citation, you could use paragraph numbers or section titles instead of page numbers.
    Reply
Laura
6th October 2020 at 23:11
When referencing a Journal article, the author wrote this piece in 1990, however this was republished in a journal in 2018, Which date do I use?
Reply
    Proofed
    8th October 2020 at 09:10
    Hi, Laura. This may depend on the version of Harvard referencing you're using, so don't forget to check your university's style guide, but you would typically cite the date of the version you're using (in this case, I assume the republished version).
    Reply
Clem
31st March 2021 at 08:58
When using footnotes, the second time you cite the source you delete the journal name. After this should the title be in italics or remain not in italics.
Reply
    Proofed
    31st March 2021 at 09:16
    Hi, Clem. Which citation system are you using? Harvard referencing is an author–date system, so you don't typically use journal names in citations (only in the reference list). In a footnote system, you will often shorten footnotes to just the author's surname and a page number for subsequent citations, plus an article title if necessary for clarity, but it wouldn't usually affect whether you italicise a title or not.
    Reply
Jamie
4th March 2022 at 01:11
When an article has quite a few authors how many names should be listed before the et al.
Reply
    Proofed
    4th March 2022 at 10:11
    Hi, Jamie. If you're using Harvard referencing, you'll need to check your university's style guide for exact advice on the number of authors to cite before using 'et al.' (since there are many versions of Harvard referencing). However, as a guideline, most systems recommend using 'et al.' for sources with three or more authors (although some recommend citing all authors on the first citation and switching to 'et al.' for subsequent citations of the same source).
    Reply

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