Harvard

The Harvard System of Referencing

It is extremely important to develop a professional approach to written academic work. The mark you get for a piece of work will be affected by the professionalism with which it is presented. One aspect of professionalism in academic work is clear referencing of source material. When presenting any serious piece of academic work such as a presentation, an essay, a report or a dissertation, you must be able to show that you have used appropriate sources of information and considered relevant theories and debates within the field. To be able to do this you must be able to show where you have got your information and ideas from. If you do not indicate your sources clearly, then at best your work will be regarded as being of inferior quality, and at worst you may lay yourself open to a charge of plagiarism.

In order to indicate the sources of your information, you need to use a system of referencing. There are many different systems of referencing, known as conventions. The system that you should use is that which is most widely used by academics studying business and management. This is the Harvard system. It is explained below.

Quoting from a source. Sometimes you will want to quote the exact words from a book or article because

* You want to use it as evidence to support your argument

* You want to use it to illustrate your argument.

When you are quoting from a source you indicate this by putting the phrase or sentence in single quotation marks followed by the author’s name, the date of publication and the page number from which the quote is taken.

Example: Numerical labour flexibility is defined as the ‘ability to adjust the level of labour inputs to meet fluctuations in output’ (Atkinson and Meager, 1986, p.3).

Long quotes, of more than two or three lines, should be set apart from the main text, indented without quotation marks, and single spaced.

Example: From some employers’ points of view,...