How to Reference a Book using the Harvard Referencing Style

Print books are perhaps the most used sources in academic essays. Moreover, most UK universities use a version of Harvard referencing. As a result, it’s pretty important you know how to reference print books using the Harvard referencing style.

In-Text Citations for a Book

Harvard citations place basic source details in brackets, with additional detail saved for the reference list (see below). The details you’ll need for a citation are the author’s surname and a year of publication:

A teacher’s attitude can inform her classroom strategy (Mendler, 2012).

If you’ve named the author in the text, though, you only need to give the year of publication in brackets:

Mendler (2012) claims that classroom strategy is vital.

The only other information you might need to include in a citation like this are the relevant page numbers if you’re quoting a source directly:

According to Mendler (2012, p. 45), classroom strategy must ‘take account of teacher attitude’.

This changes slightly when a text has multiple authors (usually more than three or four), as then you only include the first listed author’s surname followed by ‘et al.’ (a Latin phrase meaning ‘and others’).

Reference List

All books cited in your essay should also be listed in your reference list, ordered alphabetically by author surname. The general format for this is:

Surname, Initial(s). (Year) Title, Place of publication, Publisher.

If you cite a book written by a single author, the reference would look something like this:

Mendler, A. N. (2012) When Teaching Gets Tough: Smart Ways to Reclaim your Game, Alexandria, ASCD.

If you cite a book written by more than one author, remember to include (and reverse) all names:

Moss, C. M. and Brookhart, S. M. (2012) Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today’s Lesson, Alexandria, ASCD.

Of course, if you want to make doubly sure all of your referencing is accurate, you could always submit your work to Proofed.