South African universities have no national referencing style. Each faculty, school or supervisor sets one, and most of the library guides we read teach a local version of Harvard: UNISA's Augmented Harvard, UCT Author-date, Stellenbosch Harvard, NWU Harvard and UJ Harvard. APA 7, Vancouver, IEEE and the footnote styles of law cover most of the rest. EdCitation, which publishes this guide, builds each reference from the publisher's own record and never composes one.
We read the library and faculty guides of nine universities on 27 September 2026: UNISA, UCT, Wits, Pretoria (UP), Stellenbosch, UJ, North-West University (NWU), UKZN and Rhodes, each linked and dated below. We report only what a guide states. The last section quotes what EdCitation's free Cite a source and Verify references returned on South African sources, faults included.
Which referencing style do South African universities use?
The one your faculty or supervisor names. UNISA's College of Economic and Management Sciences (CEMS) says the choice is the "prerogative of the promoter/supervisor" (University of South Africa, 2026b), and Pretoria's library asks students to confirm both the style and its variation with their lecturer.
| University | Faculty or subject | Style the guide names | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| UNISA | Economic and management sciences; business leadership | Augmented Harvard; an APA 7 guide too | University of South Africa (2026a, 2026b, 2026c) |
| UCT | Health sciences, undergraduate | UCT Author-date, APA 7, Vancouver | University of Cape Town Libraries (2026a) |
| Wits | Health sciences theses | Vancouver or Harvard, one only | Wits Faculty of Health Sciences (2016) |
| Wits | Architecture, planning, construction | Harvard | Wits Library (2026a) |
| Pretoria | Humanities, education, economic and management sciences, natural and agricultural sciences | APA 7 | University of Pretoria Library (2026b) |
| Pretoria | Health sciences | Vancouver; Harvard in nursing science and physiotherapy | University of Pretoria Library (2025) |
| Stellenbosch | The library's referencing guide | Harvard (Stellenbosch), with APA 7 resources | Stellenbosch University (2026) |
| UJ | Civil engineering | UJ Harvard, IEEE | University of Johannesburg Library (2026) |
| NWU | The university-wide guide | NWU Harvard, APA 7, NWU Law House Style | North-West University (2026c) |
| Rhodes | Anthropology | Harvard, after Cite Them Right | Rhodes University Library (2026) |
| Any of the six styles EdCitation builds | The entry built from a DOI or web address | Cite a source, free | EdCitation |
Where one university's pages disagree
Pretoria's main referencing page lists Harvard as the approved style for education (University of Pretoria Library, 2026c), while its assignment-writing guide says APA 7 is required in the Faculty of Education (University of Pretoria Library, 2026b). When two pages from one university differ, your module guide or lecturer settles it.
What is UNISA's Augmented Harvard referencing style?
Augmented Harvard is the version UNISA's CEMS and its Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL) teach, and the CEMS guide says its presentation rests on Marlene Burger's Bibliographic Style & Reference Techniques (University of South Africa, 2026b, 2026c). The rules the UNISA referencing guide states:
- In the text: surname, year, a colon and the page, as in (Palmer, 2010:12).
- An ampersand inside brackets; "and" when the names are part of the sentence, as in According to Wiid and Cant (2021).
- In the list, no brackets round the year; titles in sentence case; a book title in italics; an article title neither italic nor in quotation marks.
- Online sources: "Available at:" and the access date in square brackets, [Accessed: 28 November 2019].
- No date: n.d.; no place of publication: s.l.; no author: Anon.
The CEMS guide's own journal example:
Barauskaite, G. & Streimikiene, D. 2021. Corporate social responsibility and financial performance of companies: The puzzle of concepts, definitions and assessment methods. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 28: 278-287 doi: 10.1002/csr.2048
Copy the rule, not the sample
The guide is not always consistent with itself: it says editions are written in full, "2nd edition", then prints "2nd ed.", and asks for "(n.d.)" but prints "N.d.". Three sample entries carry wrong details. One gives a DOI as "10:1108/TQM-08-2020-0175", a colon where the full stop belongs. One cites a Journal of Risk and Financial Management article as 14(1), where its DOI record says volume 14, issue 5, article 195. One gives a Strategic Management Journal article pages 1-12, where the record says 1170-1181. Follow the guide's rules; take each detail from the publisher's record.
How do UCT, Wits, Stellenbosch, NWU and UJ write Harvard?
Each differently, in the details markers check.
| Variant | Et al. in the text from | Authors in the list | Access date |
|---|---|---|---|
| UCT Author-date | Four authors | Up to eight, then et al. | [2016, January 14] |
| Wits health sciences Harvard | Four authors | The first three, then et al. | Not stated |
| Stellenbosch Harvard | Three to five all named at first mention; six or more, the first five | All | [2024, October 14] |
| NWU Harvard | Three authors | Up to seven; beyond seven, the first six, an ellipsis, the last | Date of access: 11 Jun. 2019. |
| UNISA Augmented Harvard | Not stated | Not stated | [Accessed: 28 November 2019] |
| EdCitation's Harvard (Cite Them Right) | Four authors | Five authors came back as the first and et al. | (Accessed: 27 September 2026) |
UCT Author-date
UCT's guide was called Harvard UCT: Handbook on Citation until 2016. Its authors decided on the new title in 2015, after Harvard University told them its trademarks could not be used without written permission (De Jager and Steele, 2016). The page follows the year after a colon, (Leedy & Ormrod, 2014:157); an online source ends with "Available:" and the date, year first, in square brackets; a DOI needs no access date. The guide's example for a South African Journal of Science article:
Cherry, J. 2011. Animal history meets social history: a new look at horses in South African history. South African Journal of Science. 107(1/2):5-6. DOI:10.4102/sajs.v107i1/2.495.
UCT's law library still calls it "the UCT-Harvard citation format" (University of Cape Town Libraries, 2026b), so expect both names.
Wits
The Faculty of Health Sciences allows Vancouver or Harvard and asks for one style throughout a thesis (Wits Faculty of Health Sciences, 2016). Wits' Built Environment library teaches Harvard with a colon before the page, Smith (1995:4), single quotation marks, and no initials in the text (Wits Library, 2026a). The same page's sample "reference list entry", Smith, J. (2020). Introduction to information literacy. Academic Press., is in APA form. Ask your school which it marks.
Stellenbosch, NWU and UJ
Stellenbosch Harvard uses no ibid. or op. cit., writes [s.a.] for an undated source, and adds no access date after a DOI (Stellenbosch University, 2026). NWU sets et al. in italics and ends every entry with a full stop unless it ends in a DOI or URL (North-West University, 2026b, 2026d). UJ Harvard, in its civil engineering guide, keeps the year in brackets in the list, Boughton, J.M. (2002)., and one sample writes a DOI as "https://www.doi :10.1177/1464884907089007", which does not resolve (University of Johannesburg Library, 2026). Rhodes' anthropology page says its Harvard follows Cite Them Right (10th edition), yet writes pages after a colon, (Graeber 2007:365-367), where Cite Them Right uses "p." (see our Harvard referencing guide).
Which styles do health sciences, engineering and law use?
Vancouver in medicine, IEEE in engineering, APA 7 in the social sciences and footnotes in law, with local exceptions.
Vancouver in medicine and health sciences
Wits' clinical medicine library calls Vancouver a style popular in healthcare and points to the National Library of Medicine's Citing Medicine (Wits Library, 2026b). The Wits faculty guide lists up to six authors, then et al., and wants journal names abbreviated. Pretoria sets Vancouver across health sciences, with Harvard in nursing science and physiotherapy; UCT's health sciences guide teaches Vancouver beside UCT Author-date and APA 7 (University of Cape Town Libraries, 2026a). See our Vancouver referencing guide.
IEEE in engineering, APA 7 in the social sciences
UJ's civil engineering guide carries an IEEE guide dated 2025 beside UJ Harvard, and Pretoria's assignment guide lists IEEE for engineering, computer science and information technology. The same Pretoria guide calls APA 7 the most widely used style at UP and lists up to 20 authors in an entry (University of Pretoria Library, 2026b). See our IEEE referencing guide.
Legal referencing in law
Law schools cite in footnotes, each to its own standard. UKZN's Law School follows the South African Law Journal (SALJ) style, with footnotes and a bibliography required for assignments (University of KwaZulu-Natal Library, 2026). UCT's Law Faculty has its own research, writing, style and referencing guide, and the law library links the SALJ citation guide (University of Cape Town Libraries, 2026b). NWU has a Law House Style. Pretoria's assignment guide names OSCOLA for its Faculty of Law. EdCitation does not build SALJ, OSCOLA or any law house style: write those footnotes by hand from your faculty's guide.
Can you reference in Afrikaans or another South African language?
Only three guides we read say how. NWU's rule is that the reference list keeps the language of the source, not the language of your paper (North-West University, 2026b), and NWU publishes its 2020 guide in Afrikaans as the NWU-Verwysingsgids 2020 (North-West University, 2026c). Stellenbosch says that in a text written in Afrikaans, "ed." becomes (red.), "eds." becomes (reds.) and "tr." becomes (vert.), and that an Afrikaans surname keeps its prefix at the front: Laura du Toit is listed as Du Toit (Stellenbosch University, 2026). Pretoria's Department of Afrikaans has its own referencing document (University of Pretoria Library, 2026a).
UCT's guide includes a dictionary of isiXhosa among its examples, but none of the guides we read gives a rule for a paper written in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana or another official language. Ask your department. Our guides to citing a non-English source and names in references across cultures cover the general rules.
What do South African universities say about plagiarism?
UNISA's Policy on Academic Integrity, approved by its Council on 10 June 2017, defines plagiarism as appropriating another's work "whether intentionally or unintentionally, without proper acknowledgement" (University of South Africa, 2017). It treats listing sources you did not use, and citing a primary work you met only in a secondary source as if you had read it, as misrepresentation. It also says that at first-year level a technical breach will not necessarily go to a disciplinary investigation, and a consultative approach may fit better. NWU's library adds that a sentence you translate or paraphrase still needs its in-text reference and list entry (North-West University, 2026a). Read your own university's policy.
How do you reference correctly at a South African university?
- Find the style and its variant in your module guide, or ask your lecturer or supervisor.
- Download your faculty's own guide from the library, and note its date.
- Start each entry in EdCitation's Cite a source from its DOI, ISBN or page address, choosing Harvard, APA 7, Vancouver or IEEE.
- Convert a Harvard entry by hand to your variant: the year's brackets, the colon before the page, the number of authors, "Available:" or "Available at:", and the access date.
- Write law footnotes by hand from the faculty guide.
- Run the finished list through Verify references, and resolve each entry marked "check this".
- Paste your assignment's instructions into Check your paper to see the required style, word limits and number of sources as a checklist.
What did EdCitation return on South African sources?
EdCitation is the right first step for a South African reference list, because every entry starts from the publisher's record: the same record that exposed the wrong issue, pages and DOI in the universities' own samples above. A chatbot that writes references cannot promise that. Given a DOI, title, PubMed ID, ISBN or page address, Cite a source produces the entry in six styles (Harvard after Cite Them Right, APA 7, Vancouver, IEEE, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date) and screens the work for retraction. Neither tool asks for an account or payment, and EdCitation composes no part of a student's essay, assignment or thesis. We ran four DOIs, three from South African journals, and one government page.
Cite a source on four DOIs and a gov.za page
For 10.4102/sajs.v107i1/2.495, the UCT guide's own example, it returned in Harvard:
Cherry, J. (2011) ‘Animal history meets social history: A new look at horses in South African history’, South African Journal of Science, 107(1/2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajs.v107i1/2.495.
Correct Cite Them Right, but with no pages, which the record lacks; UCT's guide gives 5-6. For UCT Author-date, take the year out of brackets, drop the quotation marks and add the pages.
For 10.4102/sajip.v37i2.859, NWU's example, Harvard opened "Schreurs, B. et al. (2011)" where NWU lists all five authors. Its IEEE entry abbreviated the journal in lower case, "SA j ind psychol", and no style carried the article number, 859.
For 10.1002/csr.2048, UNISA's example, APA gave 2021 and Harvard gave 2020 for the same article: the record dates it online in September 2020, in volume 28 of 2021. UNISA's guide uses 2021; make every entry agree. For 10.4102/ve.v34i1.676 the article number, 676, was missing again.
For https://www.gov.za/about-sa/education every style came back titled "Education | South African Government", with no author and no date:
Education | South African Government (no date). Available at: https://www.gov.za/about-sa/education (Accessed: 27 September 2026).
Change the title to "Education" and enter South African Government as the author in the web-page form, then build the entry.
Verify references on six entries from the guides
We pasted six entries exactly as UNISA's and UCT's guides print them. Verify references answered:
- Salehi and Arianpoor, with the colon in its DOI: verified, "Title, year and first author match a published record." It did not mention the broken DOI.
- Barauskaite and Streimikiene, Sityata and colleagues, and Vaara and Fritsch: verified, "The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches." Neither the wrong issue nor the wrong pages was reported.
- UCT's Digby example, with a JSTOR address: "check this", "No registry holds the DOI 10.2307/4100639. The work is on record with the DOI 10.1017/s0021853705000836." Right: the doi.org registry returns nothing for that string.
- Cant and Van Heerden, Marketing management, 4th edition, 2020: "check this", "A book with this title and author is catalogued, but no edition from 2020 is recorded." We could not confirm the edition either.
No entry came back "could not check"; when one does, EdCitation says so and never calls it "not found". Compare issues and pages with the record yourself. For a whole dissertation checked from the file, References from a file and Mechanics QA come with Pro, $8 a month; see pricing.
Quick questions
Does UNISA use Harvard or APA?
Both. CEMS and SBL teach Augmented Harvard, CEMS also publishes an APA 7 guide, and the supervisor chooses.
Is UCT Author-date the same as Harvard?
UCT Author-date is UCT's Harvard, renamed in 2016: year without brackets, a colon before the page, the access date in square brackets.
Does Wits use Harvard or Vancouver?
The Wits Faculty of Health Sciences allows either, one style per thesis. Its Built Environment library teaches Harvard.
Can EdCitation build SALJ or OSCOLA references for law?
No. The six styles in EdCitation's Cite a source are Harvard, APA 7, Vancouver, IEEE, MLA 9 and Chicago 18 author-date; SALJ, OSCOLA and house-style footnotes are typed by hand.
Can I write my reference list in Afrikaans?
NWU's guide says each entry keeps the language of its source. Stellenbosch uses (red.), (reds.) and (vert.) in a text written in Afrikaans.
References
- De Jager, K., & Steele, D. (2016). UCT author-date reference guide: Based on the Harvard referencing style [PDF]. UCT Libraries. https://hdl.handle.net/11427/31646
- North-West University. (2026a). Introduction. NWU Harvard Referencing Guide. https://libguides.nwu.ac.za/harvard-referencing
- North-West University. (2026b). Reference list. NWU Harvard Referencing Guide. https://libguides.nwu.ac.za/harvard-referencing/reference-list
- North-West University. (2026c). Referencing downloads. NWU Harvard Referencing Guide. https://libguides.nwu.ac.za/harvard-referencing/referencing-downloads
- North-West University. (2026d). Text references. NWU Harvard Referencing Guide. https://libguides.nwu.ac.za/harvard-referencing/text-references
- Rhodes University Library. (2026). Referencing. Anthropology LibGuide. https://ru.za.libguides.com/c.php?g=174172&p=1148156
- Stellenbosch University. (2026). Harvard (Stellenbosch) examples A-Z. Library guides. https://libguides.sun.ac.za/StepbyStep/HarvardA-Z
- University of Cape Town Libraries. (2026a). Referencing: UCT author-date. Health Sciences Undergraduate Library Guide. https://libguides.lib.uct.ac.za/healthundergrad/referencing
- University of Cape Town Libraries. (2026b). Citation guide / referencing. Law Library Guide. https://libguides.lib.uct.ac.za/c.php?g=222000&p=1482561
- University of Johannesburg Library. (2026). Referencing & citation. Civil Engineering LibGuide. https://uj.ac.za.libguides.com/civilengineering/uj_havard
- University of KwaZulu-Natal Library. (2026). Referencing. Law and Legal Studies LibGuide. https://libguides.ukzn.ac.za/c.php?g=771123&p=5531276
- University of Pretoria Library. (2025). Referencing and citing for health sciences. Faculty Libraries for Health Sciences. https://library.up.ac.za/health/journals
- University of Pretoria Library. (2026a). Referencing. Afrikaans subject guide. https://library.up.ac.za/c.php?g=245834&p=1636910
- University of Pretoria Library. (2026b). Referencing. Assignment Writing subject guide. https://library.up.ac.za/c.php?g=1525232&p=11423429
- University of Pretoria Library. (2026c). Referencing. Referencing subject guide. https://library.up.ac.za/referencing
- University of South Africa. (2017). Policy on academic integrity [PDF]. https://www.unisa.ac.za/static/corporate_web/Content/Colleges/CAES/Research/docs/Policy_on_Academic_Integrity.pdf
- University of South Africa. (2026a). CEMS APA 7th edition referencing style guide. UNISA LibGuides. https://libguides.unisa.ac.za/CEMSAPA7th
- University of South Africa. (2026b). CEMS Harvard referencing style. UNISA LibGuides. https://libguides.unisa.ac.za/CEMSHarvard
- University of South Africa. (2026c). SBL Harvard referencing style. UNISA LibGuides. https://libguides.unisa.ac.za/c.php?g=1260430
- Wits Faculty of Health Sciences. (2016). Style guide for theses, dissertations and research reports [PDF]. University of the Witwatersrand. https://www.wits.ac.za/media/wits-university/faculties-and-schools/health-sciences/research-entities/documents/FACULTY%20OF%20HEALTH%20SCIENCES%20STYLE%20GUIDE%20FOR%20THESES-DISSERTATIONS-AND-RESEARCH%20REPORTS-Updated%20Marh%202016.pdf
- Wits Library. (2026a). Referencing & citation. Built Environment (Martienssen) Library guide, University of the Witwatersrand. https://libguides.wits.ac.za/c.php?g=145479&p=10831358
- Wits Library. (2026b). Vancouver reference style. WHSL Clinical Medicine guide, University of the Witwatersrand. https://libguides.wits.ac.za/c.php?g=1463387&p=10886853