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.

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.