My Information Skills

Online document

To create an end-text reference in the Harvard style for an online document, we need to follow the following formatting pattern:

The Harvard end-text reference for this document will be:

The in-text reference will look like this:

Notes:

• Include the full names of all authors in your end-text reference. It is permissible to use commonly known abbreviations for organisation names in your in-text reference.
• Ensure you include any version numbering or revision dates you find. This allows your reader to understand why content of the document may have changed if they access the URL at a later time.
• Include a description of the document if the title alone is not meaningful enough.
• The publisher will often be the organisation who hosts the website where the document is located online.
  • It is okay to abbreviate the publisher's name here if the publisher was also listed as an author.
  • If your lecturer supplied you with a direct link to the document, you may need to look a little deeper to determine where the document is hosted online. Try right clicking on the link and selecting 'copy link address' to determine the document's URL. The first part of the URL should help you to determine what website hosts the document.
• ​Write your viewed date in full with the day first, the month written and full, and then the year.
  e.g. 1 December 2017
• Your word processing software will often automatically turn URLs into a hyperlink. The Harvard referencing style specifies that hyperlinks should be removed and URLs listed between right angled brackets ( < > ). To remove a hyperlink, right click and select 'remove hyperlink'.
• To identify the URL on a pdf, right click on the link to the pdf document and select 'copy link address'.