By the Deslop desk · Published 16 Aug 2026 · Cite Them Right, 13th edition
Harvard is not a style. It is a family of styles, and nobody owns the name.
That is why two guides can both say "Harvard" and disagree about the punctuation. It is also why your friend's reference list looks different from yours and you are both convinced you are right.
In UK and Australian universities the version being asked for is almost always Cite Them Right, by Pears and Shields. If your handbook says Harvard without naming a manual, that is the safe assumption. Check the handbook anyway, because a department that has its own house variant will care about it.
This guide uses Cite Them Right, 13th edition, published in 2025. That edition changed something, which we will get to.
If you have used APA, three things will look wrong and are not.
There is no comma after the author's surname group before the year. There is no full stop inside the year bracket. And the URL is introduced by the words Available at, rather than sitting bare at the end.
Each reference below came out of our own citation generator with Harvard selected. These are not examples we typed by hand.
Initials follow the surname with no space between them if there are two. Cite Them Right writes Smith, A.B. rather than Smith, A. B.
Write the organisation's name in full, with no initials and no abbreviation, even when the site brands itself with an acronym.
Nothing special happens here, and that is worth knowing. APA has a rule about dropping a repeated site name. MLA has a rule about collapsing the author into the publisher slot. Harvard has neither, because the webpage pattern never had a separate site-name element. One less thing to remember.
The title has moved to the front and kept its italics. Your in-text citation uses the italicised title too, because the reader finds the entry by whatever comes first.
Written out in full. Not n.d., which is the APA abbreviation and a common slip in Harvard bibliographies.
Cite Them Right updated its guidance during 2025 to bring some reference types closer to other styles. The change that catches people is this one: place of publication is no longer required for books.
So a book reference now ends with the publisher, and London: or Basingstoke: has gone. Webpages were never affected, because a webpage reference never carried a place of publication.
The practical problem is that a great many university guides, and most free citation generators, still produce the old form. If your reference list mixes both, it looks careless even though half of it was right at some point.
This is where Harvard and APA point in opposite directions, and mixing them up is the giveaway that someone has copied a reference from the wrong guide.
APA restricts retrieval dates to pages designed to change that are not archived, which is rare. Harvard includes an accessed date on web pages as standard, because web content can change under you.
There is one exception worth knowing. When a source has a DOI, Cite Them Right treats the DOI as a permanent identifier, so no accessed date is needed. That applies to most journal articles. Our generator follows this: give it a DOI and the accessed date disappears from the output.
Five checks.
Does the entry start with a name or an italicised title, never a date? Is the year in round brackets with no full stop inside? Does the URL follow the words Available at? Is there an accessed date, written as day month year? And does the first word of your in-text citation match the first word of the entry?
Author, year in brackets, italic title, Available at, accessed date. With no author the italic title slides into the front and the in-text citation follows it there. Write no date in full rather than n.d., skip the place of publication on books, and remember that Harvard wants the accessed date that APA does not.
Build the citation free, nothing leaves your browser →Sources: Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2025) Cite them right, 13th edn, as summarised in current university style sheets from Newcastle University, the University of Westminster and the University of Birmingham, including the 2025 change removing place of publication from book references. Cite Them Right Online on web pages with no dates, and on DOIs removing the need for an accessed date. Our own output: generated 16 August 2026 with the Deslop citation engine, tested across 126 combinations of source type, style and missing information. More: citation generator · all articles.