Harvard Reference Generator Tool

The Harvard Reference Generator tool is designed to create references for your bibliography in the correct form.

Why have a bibliography?

A Bibliography is a list of the books (or other sources of information) that you consulted when writing an essay, report, thesis or dissertation.

When doing research, we very rarely come up with our own entirely new theories or ideas. These take time to develop, and involve putting them out for debate. By researching the theories of others, we include ideas in our works that have already gone through that academic testing.

However, you have to be aware that you are using someone else's work for your own benefit. You will get the marks, but the author of the ideas may have put in decades of research to come up with the concepts.

Therefore, you need to ensure that you reference your sources - essentially giving credit to the person whom you are citing.

Why the "Harvard System"?

Books have a standard layout (front cover, copyright material, list of chapters, the chapters, index, back cover). This is so that you can walk into any library in the World, and very quickly be able to access what you were looking for. You could open a book, turn to the index (arranged alphabetically) and then find the page where the information is included.

When academics are citing sources, it is important that the same principle applies. Someone should very quickly be able to relocate the work you are referring to, either to check it's authority or legitimacy, or for more information.

Harvard University developed their own formula for how these should be arranged. This usually involves the year of publication, the surname and initials of the author, the title of the book (and chapter, if needed), and the page/s. Some of this text appears in brackets, some in italics. The result is, someone can quickly locate exactly what they are looking for with just a glance.

Reference Tool

The Reference Generator on this site takes in the raw information (author, title, etc) then creates the correct form for you. You can then highlight and copy this straight into your Word document (or whichever word processor you are using).

Please note: this site, or the tool, is not associated with Harvard University.