When referencing a website, you will sometimes need to do some hunting to locate all of the information you need for your reference.
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The full name of the webpage can be found in the tab on your browser. If the full name does not fit in the tab, hover your mouse over the tab to see the full title:
Look for the copyright symbol (©) as the copyright statement is often the best place to find the publication date and author. Often the copyright statement will be at the very bottom of a webpage. You might also see the publication date described as the 'last updated' date.
Where there is no copyright statement, further details may be able to be found in an 'About Us' or 'Contact Us' section of the website.
Don't forget to take note of the date when you accessed the site as you will also need to record this in your reference.
To create an end-text reference in the Harvard style for a website, we need to follow the following formatting pattern:
The Harvard end-text reference for this website will be:
BBC 2018, BBC Earth - Climate change has natural and manmade causes, viewed 30 January 2018, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/earth/atmosphere_and_climate/climate>.
The in-text reference will look like this:
(BBC 2018)
Notes:
- Write your viewed date in full with the day first, the month written in full, and then the year.
e.g. 1 December 2017
- When you cannot find a date, you can instead use the abbreviation n.d. (which stands for 'no date').
- When a webpage has a personal author, list the personal author first, and the publisher (usually the corporation that hosts the website) after the title.
e.g. Robbins, R 2009, Facebook profile: should educators be afraid of having a facebook profile?, Learning Putty, viewed 19 May 2010, <http://learningputty.com/2009/11/20/should-educators-be-afraid-of-having-a-facebook-profile/>.
- 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'.
- Don't forget the full stop at the end of your reference.
