All of the resources you use within an assignment need referencing.

Referencing material serves two purposes. First it allows readers of your work to find the resources you used when compiling the assignment, and secondly, by acknowledging material you can avoid problems of plagiarism.

Harvard referencing uses the author and the date of the work in the main body of the text, and then has a reference list at the end of the essay which contains the references cited in alphabetical order by author. The reference list contains the full details of the book or journal cited. Because you only refer to a shortened form of works in the main essay (author, date) your essay doesn't get filled with too much reference material. The use of the author/date shorthand does make it easy to locate works in the reference list. Other referencing systems use superscript numbers to refer to footnotes but these can become overcomplicated as the number of footnotes rises, and the chance of misnumbering occurs.

An example from the main body of a text:
Within the last ten years, teachers who have attended INSET courses have reported that the courses have helped to increase their competence and confidence in using IT (see, for example, Higham and Morris, 1993; ESRC 1990), yet despite the fact that the passing years have presented opportunities for more teachers to increase their skills in IT, weaknesses identified by McCoy (1992) seem to be still evident (Gillmon, 1998; Goldstein 1997). This suggests that we need to look for explanations other than attendance at INSET courses for the reasons for the apparently poor state of teachers' competence and confidence in IT.

In this text the author is citing entire works by other researchers to support her argument. Notice the use of brackets and the author/s and dates of all works.

Another example from the main body of a text:
One resource provided in the secondary speech genre is the "posited author" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 312).

Here the quotation is a direct one so a page number has been added.
Quotations of no more than two sentences can be incorporated into the main text and marked off with quotation marks, but if you quote a longer passage it must be placed in a separate paragraph and indented from the left and right margins of the main text.

Reference lists

All references used in the main body of assignment need including in the reference list. This is arranged in alphabetical order by author surname. Books, journals and other media are all included in the same list, do not start separate lists for books and journals, it will confuse your reader.

Books
Books are listed by author, date, title, place of publication, publisher:

Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The title of the book is either underlined or placed in italics, whichever style you use you should stick to it for all references. When the books has more than one author then list them in order they appear on the book, if it has more than 3 then the abbreviation et. al. (and others) can be used. If an author has published more than book or journal in a year then mark each one with an a,b,c etc. after the date. For example (Brittas 1989a). Make sure the reference in the body of the text corresponds to the one in the reference list at the end of your work.

Journals
Journals are listed by author, date, title of article, title of journal, part number, page numbers (beginning of article - end of article

Somekh, B. and Davies, R. (1991) 'Towards a pedagogy for information technology', The Curriculum Journal, 2, 2 153-70.

The title of the journal is underlined or italicised because someone searching for the article in a library will first need to find the journal. The page numbers help to locate the article quickly.

Chapters in edited books
When you need to quote from a chapter in an edited book you need to follow this form. In your main text you quote the author of the chapter (not the editor/s of the book) and the date of the book. In the reference list you quote the author and date of the chapter first, and follow it with a reference to the book. In the following example, the chapter by Schlegoff has been quoted, so (Schlegoff, 1972) or a variant would appear in the main text, followed by this in the reference section.

Schlegoff, E. (1972) Notes on a conversational practice: Formulating place. In D. Sudnow (Ed.) Studies in Social Interaction (pp. 75-119). New York: Free Press.

Note the use of page numbers to identify the chapter - as in journal citation.

Electronic Information
The key to referencing a CD-ROM or website is similar to a book or journal - you need to know the author, date and title. For web pages you must include the full address of the page, not just the address of the site. This can be copied from the address bar which normally appears at the top of the browser.

Pearson, M. (1999) Online study skills guide, http:\\www.hud.ac.uk\schools\skills \referen.htm, Date accessed 16/9/99.

An extra date, the date you accessed the page is included at the end of the reference, because webpages, unlike books, can be modified and even disappear entirely. To reference material on a CD-ROM use this format:

Lewis, R. (1997) A Guide to Icelandic Literature, CD-ROM, London: Placebo Publishers.

If you cannot find the date of a web page then mark it as "date unknown". If you cannot find a named author of an electronic source then either use the organisation in place of the author (e.g. BBC) or mark it as "author unknown". If you need advice on using the WWW and Internet as a research tool then click this link.

For more information about using the Harvard referencing system ask the librarian for an information sheet which contains many examples from different resources.
The golden rule is be consistent, make sure the full set of information is listed in your reference list and that you stick to the same format for each entry.