University Library
Harvard System Citing & Referencing Guide
Introduction
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Citing and referencing is an important part of the assignment writing process

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When writing an assignment, whenever you use ideas, quotes or any other material from a source (a book, journal, conference paper, newspaper, website etc.), you must show in the text of your assignment, where the material has come from by using an in-text citation

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You must also provide a reference list at the end of your work, providing full details of all the sources you have cited in your work, presented alphabetically by author or editor. Why provide citations and references?
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Citing and referencing allows you to acknowledge the work of others

AND to demonstrate that:
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You have gathered evidence to support your ideas and arguments

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You have used credible, good quality sources

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Have read widely and at an appropriate academic level

AND
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Allows your tutor to differentiate between your own work and the work of others and to locate the sources you have used.

Plagiarism
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If you do not cite and reference ideas, quotes or any other material that you have used from a source you may be accused of plagiarism

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Plagiarism is defined as presenting someone else’s work as your own. It’s academic theft! To avoid plagiarism you MUST always note accurately and fully the details of all the sources you use

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The following Heriot Watt guide aims to help you avoid plagiarism: http://www.hw.ac.uk/registry/resources/PlagiarismGuide.pdf 1

What are in-text citations?
These appear in the body of your work (e.g. as you write your essay). Harvard citations must provide the following information:
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The surname of the author(s) or editor(s) of the source being cited

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Publication year

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AND where possible, the page numbers you have taken material from, (especially when quoting directly from a source).

In-text citations (example 1)
In the following example I have used a source (a book, written by Clegg) and I have made reference to his name in the text of my essay:
According to Clegg (1985, p.543) the inter-war period was……..
Clegg is the author of the source 1985 is the date when the source was published p.543 is the number of the page the information I have used has come from

In-text citations (example 2)
In this example I have used information from a source but placed information about the author in brackets (with date and page number information) at the end of the sentence:
25% of manufacturing jobs were lost in the 1980’s (Jones, 1995, pp.64-65).
Jones is the author of the source

1995 is the date when the source was published pp.64-65 are the pages I have taken information from

You can also use this system at an appropriate point in a sentence. For example:
Production fell by one fifth in 2009 (Smith, 2010, p.6) and continued to fall….

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When must I provide a citation?
Whenever you use ideas from, refer to, or quote from, another person’s work you MUST acknowledge this in your work by citing and referencing.

You must provide a citation whenever you use ideas, theories, facts, experiments, case studies, adopt another person’s research method, survey or experiment design and whenever you use statistics, tables, diagrams, drawings etc. from a source.

You must also provide a citation whenever you:

Quote directly: this is where you use another person’s ideas in their own words. If you present information exactly as it appears in a source, indicate this by using quotation marks, i.e.: ‘Market segmentation is where the larger market is heterogeneous and can be broken down into smaller units’ (Easy and Sorensen, 2009, p.133).

Paraphrase: this is where you present another person’s ideas in your own words. In the following example an original passage from a book (sentence 1) has been changed using my own words (sentence 2).