Referencing and Citation Help — Harvard, OSCOLA, APA

Why "Harvard" is not one style

This is the biggest source of referencing confusion in UK universities. Harvard is not one fixed standard. It is a family of author-date styles, and every university does it slightly differently. Cite Them Right Harvard, Leeds Harvard, Coventry Harvard and Bath Harvard all disagree. They differ on punctuation, on capital letters, on where the year goes, and on what to do when a source has no date.

A reference generator that produces generic Harvard will produce output your department marks as incorrect. We work from your university’s published guide, and if you can tell us which one your library recommends we will follow it exactly.

The errors that cost the most marks

1. Orphan citations — a source cited in the text that never appears in the reference list, or a reference listed that is never cited. Markers check this and it reads as careless at best.
2. Missing page numbers on direct quotations. Required in every style, omitted constantly.
3. Secondary citation done wrong. If you read Smith discussing Jones and you cite Jones directly, you have claimed to read something you have not. The correct form is "Jones (1998), cited in Smith (2015)".
4. Websites without access dates or with a bare URL and nothing else — no author, no title, no organisation.
5. Inconsistent ordering. Author-date styles alphabetise; numeric styles order by first appearance. Mixing them signals the reference list was assembled at 3am.
6. DOIs omitted where the style requires them, which APA 7th and IEEE both do.

Discipline-specific styles

OSCOLA for law

OSCOLA is footnote-based with no in-text citation at all, and it has strict conventions for cases, statutes and legislation. Neutral citations, correct law report hierarchy, pinpoint paragraph references, and the distinction between an opinion and a judgment all matter. Getting OSCOLA wrong is highly visible to a law marker.

APA 7th for psychology and education

APA 7th changed a lot from the 6th edition. You now list up to twenty authors. You drop the publisher location. DOIs go in as full https links. And you use "et al." from the very first citation of a three-author source. Students working from old guidance hand in 6th-edition references and lose marks for it.

Vancouver and IEEE for health, engineering and computing

Both are numeric. Vancouver is used across medicine and most nursing programmes. IEEE is used in engineering and computer science. The numbers must follow the order sources first appear in your text. Renumbering after an edit is where mistakes creep in, and that is exactly what our cross-check catches.

Use the free generator first

For straightforward sources you do not need to pay anyone. Our free Reference generator handles books, journal articles, websites, reports and chapters, all formatted to UK conventions. Use it for most of your list. Then come to us for the awkward ones: legislation, archive material, datasets, government publications, personal communications, and anything that never fits a template.