How to Do Referencing in Your Thesis in Harvard Style?
No matter how fantastic your thesis is, if you fail to properly reference your work, then you are sure to lose your marks. Referencing is an important part of any thesis. Before starting to work on your thesis, you must decide which referencing style you will use. You want footnotes or want to give short references after the text.
In most of the cases, your supervisor will let you know about the referencing style you have to use in your thesis. But in case you have to decide, you can opt from various referencing styles like APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, etc. You can also consult thesis writing service providers for this.
What Is Referencing?
In a thesis, you must provide accurate reference to all the sources from which you have cited your data. They include books, journals, articles, and any other source of information. You must inform your readers about the source of your material. This not only helps the readers to explore more by themselves but also protects you from plagiarism.
What Is Harvard Referencing?
The Harvard style of referencing is an author-year system of referencing in which the source is written right after the text. In this way, you reference direct to the reference list. It is a common referencing style used in various academic papers.
As the citation is directly embedded in the text, only short forms are used and that too in parenthesis. Due to this reason, it is also known as parenthetical referencing. This referencing style does not use footnotes at all. It is considered as one of the simplest yet economical styles of referencing.
Harvard Style of Referencing
It requires you to provide the source of your information or ideas in the following ways:
- In-text or parenthetical citations
- At the end of the thesis in a reference list. The list is an alphabetical presentation of all the references you have used.
In-Text Citations
In in-text citations, the author and date are cited in parentheses. If the author’s name comes in the sentence, the date is written in parentheses just after the author’s name.
For e.g.:
Honesty is the best policy. (Phillips 2000).
A Museum in Rome written by Kate (2009) is the...
Page Numbers
If you have used a direct quote or the reader has to be directed to a specific page or pages, you can use page numbers. Do not forget a comma after the date. Use the abbreviation ‘p’ for single page and ‘pp’ for multiple pages. If no page number is there, you can give the paragraph number.
For e.g. –
Honesty is the best policy. (Phillips 2000, p.21).
A Museum in Rome written by Kate (2009, pp.21-24) is the...
The Harvard referencing is best referencing style. (John 2001, para. 4).
Long Quotes
For long quotes (around 40-50 words), begin the quoted text in a different line after a colon. For longer quotes, quotation marks should be used and indentation should be there. The text must be one font size smaller.
For e.g. -
John, Smith & Phillips (2018, p.4) says:
The quote of 4-5 lines will come here.
Multiple Citations
If you have multiple citations, separate each reference by a semi-colon and list them in alphabetical order.
For e.g. –
Honesty is the best policy (Hillary 2005; John 1999; Smith 2019).
You can easily put Harvard referencing in practice and use it for your thesis as it does not need any footnotes.
Summary: This article shares the way you can do referencing in your thesis in Harvard style. It also provides all the details which will be helpful for you to add different types of references in your thesis.