Harvard referencing started with a footnote in a paper about slug eggs. On page 194 of a paper printed in 1881, the zoologist Edward Laurens Mark cited an earlier paper as "(Comp. Flemming, '78b, p. 310.*)" and explained at the foot of the page that the number after a name sent the reader to the list of papers and gave "the approximate date of the paper in question" (Mark, 1881). Chernin (1988) traces today's author-date citation to that line.
This history is EdCitation's own, taken from the documents themselves in scanned copies read on 24 September 2026: Mark's paper, the 1896 lecture and 1903 tribute that credit Mark, the 1945 letters that argued over the system, and Eli Chernin's 1988 article. The later part rests on Cite Them Right's publisher pages; the book is sold by subscription, so its rules come from university libraries.
Today's rules, with examples, are set out in our Harvard referencing guide. EdCitation's free Cite a source will set any published work in Harvard from its publisher's record.
Where did Harvard referencing come from?
From a paper by Edward Laurens Mark on the eggs of the slug Limax campestris, published in 1881 as number 12 of volume 6 of the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, pages 173 to 625 (Mark, 1881). Chernin (1988) describes Mark (1847 to 1946) as Hersey professor of anatomy and director of Harvard's zoological laboratory until retiring in 1921. A footnote on the first page says it was prepared early in 1879.
What the 1881 citations looked like
The surname sat in the sentence with a bold two-digit year in brackets, as in "Robin ('75, p. 34)" on page 197, and a raised letter marked an author's second paper of a year. The papers sat in an "Alphabetic List of the Literature" from page 591, by author and then year. Until then, Chernin (1988) writes, references were tucked into footnotes flagged with asterisks, daggers and other printers' symbols.
Chernin calls page 194 "the first evidences of the system". We could not test that: proving no earlier paper did the same would mean reading every earlier journal.
Why colleagues credited Mark
In a lecture at Woods Hole in 1895, printed in 1896, Charles Sedgwick Minot of the Harvard Medical School compared two ways of citing. Numbering references was older, but writers slipped when swapping working numbers for final ones. "The other system was introduced by Professor E. L. Mark," Minot wrote, and it "has met with increasing favor": with each paper known by author and year, references could go in as the manuscript was written (Minot, 1896).
In 1903 former students marked Mark's 25 years at Harvard with a volume of papers. Their address praises the slug paper for bringing into zoology "a convenient and uniform method of referring from text to bibliography" (Parker, 1903). Chernin counts 140 students behind it; Theodore Roosevelt, then President, is among the names.
Did Mark borrow the idea from a library?
Possibly. Chernin (1988) suggests Mark may have adapted the catalogue of the Museum of Comparative Zoology's library, founded by Louis Agassiz in 1861, which filed items by author and year, then title. Chernin offers it only as a possibility.
Why is it called Harvard referencing?
Nobody knows who first called it that. In February 1945 the British Medical Journal printed an editor's note beneath a reader's letter: the origin of the term was "obscure", it was "not introduced by Harvard University", and, it was believed, an English visitor impressed by the references in use at Harvard's library had named the system on returning home (Hewer, 1945).
Chernin (1988) quotes that note and takes it apart: the origin of the phrase "remains unexplained", the visitor story is an "unconfirmed and unattributed anecdote", and it describes a library's practice, not Mark's system. Harvard Library (n.d.) today calls the name "something of a misnomer", with no official link to the university: some Harvard faculty were early users and the name stuck, especially in England and the Commonwealth. It keeps no guide to the system.
So the method can be traced to Mark and a Harvard museum's journal. The name cannot be traced to anyone.
How did author-date citation spread through the sciences?
Through zoology first, then through British science and medicine by editors' choice. The 1945 editor's note adds that in 1936 a Royal Society conference of journal editors, seeking one way of giving references, favoured what it called the Harvard system: the reader sees author and date in the text, the list falls into alphabetical order, and a late reference needs no renumbering. We found no Royal Society record of that conference, so it rests on the note.
The first recorded complaints, 1945
C. Langton Hewer wrote to the British Medical Journal in February 1945 to protest at the "so-called 'Harvard' system of annotation": "Of all possible systems of reference this is surely the worst" (Hewer, 1945).
In December A. Duff made a sharper point. A paper citing John Hilton's On Rest and Pain as 1930 would lead a reader to think it was published then, when the work was 68 years older (Duff, 1945). The year read and the year first published are different facts, and one Harvard year shows only one of them.
Why is there no single Harvard style?
Because no one owns the name. Each university library writes or chooses its own guide, and even the version many UK libraries name, Cite Them Right, changes with each edition. The differences in punctuation, et al. and place of publication are in when to use Harvard referencing.
How Cite Them Right began at one university
As one library's guide. The book's website, in archived copies, praised an edition published in 2004 by Northumbria University Press (Cite Them Right, 2006a). That edition, Cite them right: referencing made easy, was out of print by August 2006, replaced by one covering the Harvard author-date system and the British Standard numeric system (Cite Them Right, 2006b). In 2007 the site called the book "Northumbria University Library's guide to referencing" (Cite Them Right, 2007). A 2008 edition by Richard Pears and Graham Shields, from Pear Tree Books, added APA, MLA, MHRA and OSCOLA (Cite Them Right, 2009a, 2009b).
Harvard referencing, date by date
| Year | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1881 | The paper cites by author and year, explained in a footnote | Mark (1881) |
| 1896 | Minot credits the system to Mark, in a lecture given in 1895 | Minot (1896) |
| 1903 | Mark's students praise its "uniform method" | Parker (1903) |
| 1936 | A Royal Society conference of editors favours the "Harvard system" (not confirmed at the Royal Society) | Hewer (1945) |
| 1945 | Letters attack it; the editor calls the name's origin obscure | Hewer (1945); Duff (1945) |
| 1988 | Chernin traces the method to Mark; the name stays unexplained | Chernin (1988) |
| 2004 | Cite them right: referencing made easy, Northumbria University Press | Cite Them Right (2006a) |
| 2008 | Pear Tree Books edition by Pears and Shields adds four styles | Cite Them Right (2009a, 2009b) |
| 2010 | 8th edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 14 July, 112 pages | Pears and Shields (2010) |
| 2013 | 9th edition, Palgrave Macmillan, May, examples in six styles | Pears and Shields (2013) |
| 2016 | 10th edition, 20 May, 192 pages | Pears and Shields (2016) |
| 2019 | 11th edition, Red Globe Press, 8 May, 284 pages | Pears and Shields (2019) |
| 2022 | 12th edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 19 May, 312 pages | Pears and Shields (2022) |
| 2025 | 13th edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 1 May, 304 pages | Pears and Shields (2025) |
Dates and lengths are from each edition's publisher page; the 10th edition's page, read in 2020, names Red Globe Press. We could not match the editions before 2010 to the numbers one to seven, nor date the edition between 2004 and 2008.
What changed in the 13th edition of Cite Them Right?
Three changes a student will see: no place of publication for most kinds of source, optional paragraph numbers in citations, and title case for titles in the text but sentence case in the reference list, where the old advice was to copy a title as given (Stanley, 2025). Bloomsbury's page for the edition, published on 1 May 2025, adds sources such as registered designs and AI-generated material, and guidance on working with AI tools (Pears & Shields, 2025). The subscription website moved to it as of 31 July 2025 (Bloomsbury Publishing, n.d.).
Two editions in use at once
The University of the Highlands and Islands library noted that the 12th edition had gone from the website, and that markers would accept either edition in 2025/26; from 2026/27 its students are expected to follow the 13th (Hughes, 2025).
How do I cite in the Harvard version my course uses?
Find the version, build each entry from its record, adjust it, then check the list.
- Find the version in the brief. Check your paper, one of EdCitation's free tools, turns an assignment's instructions into a checklist and shows the sentence behind each rule. A test brief of ours, "Reference all sources using Cite Them Right Harvard, 13th edition.", came back with the citation style "Cite Them Right Harvard 13", and one naming Leeds Harvard came back as "Leeds Harvard". Read the sentence shown with each rule before you tick it.
- Open your library's referencing page for the version, the edition and any exception for your school.
- Build each entry in Cite a source, which works from the record and follows Cite Them Right's 12th edition.
- For a 13th-edition course, lower reference list titles to sentence case and delete the place of publication, as the 13th does for most sources; the Harvard referencing guide lists each change.
- Run the final list through Verify references, which is free as well. It marks every entry verified, "check this" or not found, flags retracted papers, and says so when it could not check an entry instead of calling it not found.
What is the best tool for building a Harvard reference?
Cite a source, from EdCitation, is the best tool for building one: it looks each work up rather than writing it. Duff's complaint in 1945 was a misleading year; a reference typed from memory, or composed by a chatbot from patterns, can carry a wrong year or name a paper that never existed. From an ISBN, a DOI, a web address, a PubMed ID or a title, Cite a source takes the author, year, volume, pages and DOI from the publisher's record. It writes Harvard to Cite Them Right's 12th edition, offers five other styles (APA 7, MLA 9, IEEE, Vancouver and Chicago 18 author-date), and checks whether the source was retracted. No account is asked for, and there is no charge.
Chernin and Hewer, as Cite a source set them
On 24 September 2026 we gave Chernin's DOI to Cite a source. The entry came from Crossref's record, and no retraction was reported:
Chernin, E. (1988) ‘The “Harvard system”: a mystery dispelled’, BMJ, 297(6655), pp. 1062–1063. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.297.6655.1062.
Hewer's letter came back with the capitals its record holds:
Hewer, C.L. (1945) ‘The Harvard System’, BMJ, 1(4389), pp. 233–234. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.1.4389.233-b.
Under the 13th edition, lower that title to "The Harvard system".
Where to look twice
Mark's paper has no DOI, and its title brought back no record of the paper itself: Cite a source offered five published works to choose from, the first a one-page item about the paper in The American Naturalist of 1882. Picking that would cite the item, not the paper. For a work older than DOIs, build the entry from a scanned copy's title page, as we did:
Mark, E.L. (1881) ‘Maturation, fecundation, and segmentation of Limax campestris, Binney’, Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, 6(12), pp. 173–625.
Verify references marked that entry "check this", with the reason: "A work with this title is recorded in The American Naturalist (1882), not in the source your entry names." It had found the 1882 item, not the paper, and said so instead of passing the entry. That is the answer to act on: hold the entry against the scan. In the same pasted list, Hewer's letter, typed with the 1945 journal name and no DOI, came back verified: "Title, year and first author match a published record." References from a file, which reads an uploaded paper and looks up each entry in it, is one of the Pro tools, at $8 a month; the Max plan, at $24 a month, adds Theoretics QA and the Library, both on the pricing page. Every one of these tools leaves the writing to you.
Quick questions
Who invented Harvard referencing?
Edward Laurens Mark, a Harvard zoologist, in an 1881 paper on slug eggs; colleagues credited Mark in print in 1896 and 1903. Whether anyone used the method earlier is unconfirmed.
Why is it called Harvard referencing?
Nobody knows. A 1945 editor's note credited an unnamed English visitor to Harvard's library, a story Eli Chernin called unconfirmed and unattributed.
Is Harvard referencing connected to Harvard University?
Only through Mark's paper, published by Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Harvard Library says there is no official connection and keeps no guide to the system.
What is the latest edition of Cite Them Right?
The 13th, published by Bloomsbury on 1 May 2025; the website followed as of 31 July 2025.
Which Cite Them Right edition does EdCitation use?
The 12th: Cite a source, EdCitation's citation builder, sets Harvard by it; for a 13th-edition course, lower reference list titles to sentence case and delete any place of publication.
References
- Bloomsbury Publishing. (n.d.). About Cite Them Right. Cite Them Right. https://www.citethemrightonline.com/about
- Chernin, E. (1988). The "Harvard system": A mystery dispelled. BMJ, 297(6655), 1062–1063. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.297.6655.1062
- Cite Them Right. (2006a). Cite them right [Home page]. Archived July 21, 2006, at https://web.archive.org/web/20060721184735/http://www.citethemright.co.uk/index.html
- Cite Them Right. (2006b). Libraries and education. Archived August 13, 2006, at https://web.archive.org/web/20060813153138/http://www.citethemright.co.uk/files/pages/eduLib.html
- Cite Them Right. (2007). Northumbria University students. Archived July 3, 2007, at https://web.archive.org/web/20070703055314/http://www.citethemright.co.uk/files/pages/northumbria.html
- Cite Them Right. (2009a). Cite them right [Home page]. Archived April 17, 2009, at https://web.archive.org/web/20090417075015/http://www.citethemright.co.uk/
- Cite Them Right. (2009b). Libraries and education. Archived October 17, 2009, at https://web.archive.org/web/20091017033721/http://www.citethemright.co.uk/files/pages/libedu.html
- Duff, A. (1945). The Harvard system. British Medical Journal, 2(4432), 864. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.2.4432.864-d
- Harvard Library. (n.d.). What is the Harvard system for citing references? Ask a Librarian. https://ask.library.harvard.edu/faq/81735
- Hewer, C. L. (1945). The Harvard system [Letter and editor's note]. British Medical Journal, 1(4389), 233–234. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.1.4389.233-b
- Hughes, R. (2025, September 8). Referencing update: Cite Them Right 13th edition. UHI Library Blog. https://libguides.uhi.ac.uk/blogs/UHI-library-blog/referencing-update-cite-them-right-13th-edition
- Mark, E. L. (1881). Maturation, fecundation, and segmentation of Limax campestris, Binney. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, 6(12), 173–625. https://archive.org/details/bulletinofmuseum06harv
- Minot, C. S. (1896). Bibliography: A study of resources. In Biological lectures delivered at the Marine Biological Laboratory of Wood's Holl in the summer session of 1895 (pp. 149–168). Ginn. https://archive.org/details/biologicallectur00maririch
- Parker, G. H. (Ed.). (1903). Mark anniversary volume. Henry Holt. https://archive.org/details/markanniversaryv00park
- Pears, R., & Shields, G. (2010). Cite them right: The essential referencing guide (8th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Archived May 12, 2012, at https://web.archive.org/web/20120512130136/http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=410850
- Pears, R., & Shields, G. (2013). Cite them right: The essential referencing guide (9th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Archived September 14, 2015, at https://web.archive.org/web/20150914131936/http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/Cite-Them-Right/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137273116
- Pears, R., & Shields, G. (2016). Cite them right: The essential referencing guide (10th ed.). Red Globe Press. Archived August 10, 2020, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200810162803/https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Cite-Them-Right/?K=9781137585042
- Pears, R., & Shields, G. (2019). Cite them right: The essential referencing guide (11th ed.). Red Globe Press. Archived October 22, 2019, at https://web.archive.org/web/20191022074523/https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Cite-Them-Right/?K=9781352005134
- Pears, R., & Shields, G. (2022). Cite them right: The essential referencing guide (12th ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. Archived May 18, 2022, at https://web.archive.org/web/20220518034723/https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cite-them-right-9781350933446/
- Pears, R., & Shields, G. (2025). Cite them right: The essential referencing guide (13th ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. Archived October 12, 2025, at https://web.archive.org/web/20251012181522/https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cite-them-right-9781350477261/
- Stanley, T. (2025, October 8). Referencing made easy: The latest Cite Them Right changes explained. The Open University Library. https://university.open.ac.uk/library/library/news/referencing-made-easy-the-latest-cite-them-right-changes-explained