Hi everyone, and welcome to this short video. Today we are going to
talk about how to write a reference for a book using Harvard referencing style.
Now, the majority of ebooks are available in print form, so in most cases, you’ll be
referencing books and ebooks in the same way. But if an ebook is not available in print form, then
we have a slightly different way of referencing it, and this will be covered later in the video.
So, here are the elements that you’ll need to reference a book correctly.
You can usually find this information on the front or back cover,
or somewhere on the first couple of pages of the book, or in the library catalogue.
So here’s an example of a library catalogue - let’s see where the
referencing information is usually found.
Author name(s)
Year of publication Title of the book
Any edition number Publishing company
Place of publication. The place of publication
is the location of the publisher. If more than one place is listed,
just use the first one, or the one that’s highlighted in bold type (if there is one).
So, here we have the basic format for referencing a book in Harvard style. This is
how we’ll arrange the referencing information that we’ve just drawn from our catalogue.
First we have the authors, keeping the authors in the same order as they appear in the book.
We start with the author’s last name and their initial.
Notice that there’s a comma between all the author’s names and their initials. There is also
a comma to separate the first two authors, but we place an ampersand before the last author’s name,
like this. Notice that in Harvard style, we don’t use full stops to punctuate the authors’ initials.
Now, after the last author’s initial, we have a space before the year of publication, and this
is followed by a comma. Then comes the title of the book which is in italics and sentence case.
Sentence case just means we capitalise the first word of the title and any proper nouns.
Next, we have the publisher name,
followed by a comma, and the place of publication, followed by a full stop.
So let’s have a look at how our book fits with this format.
First, we have the authors’ last names and their initials. Our book has only two authors,
we simply use an ampersand before the last author’s name, not a comma.
See that after the last author’s initial, we have a space before the year of publication. Then after
the year of publication, there is a comma before the title of the book which is in italics and
sentence case. When a title has two parts, as this title does, we also capitalise the first word of
the second part of the title. Then the publisher name, a comma, and the place of publication.
Now, what if our book was an edited book or a book in another edition?
Again, we can find all the information on the first few pages of the book itself,
or in the library catalogue – so let’s look at this example for the information we need:
Editor name(s)
Year of publication Title of the book
Edition number, and this book appears to be in its first edition.
Publishing company Place of publication.
And here’s an example of the format we use for referencing an edited book.
Notice that the elements follow the same pattern as our previous example, but instead of the author
names, we have the names of the editors. Again, we have a comma separating the first two editors,
and an ampersand, not a comma, separating the last two editors. Then, after the last initial,
we have the abbreviation for the word “editors” which you can see is ‘eds’ – all in lowercase
and punctuated with a full stop – and this information is contained within round brackets.
Then we have the year of publication. Note that there’s no comma between the
editor information and the year of publication,
there is only a space, before the book title, publisher and place of publication.
So let’s have a look at how our book fits with this format.
First, we have the editor’s last names and their initials. As our book has three editors, we have
used commas to separate the first 2 editors, and an ampersand before the last editor’s name.
See that after the last editor’s initial, we have the editor information contained in
round brackets, then a space before the year of publication, and then a comma.
Next, we have the title of the book which is in italics and sentence
case. Notice that in sentence case, we use capitals for the first word of the title,
as well as for names or proper nouns, so we have capitalised the name Wiley Blackwell as
well. The title is followed by a comma, and then we have the publisher name, a comma,
and the place of publication, which in this case is Chichester, in West Sussex in the UK.
Now, let’s take a look at how to reference a book in an edition other than the first edition:
Here is the basic format for referencing a book in another edition.
Note that all the elements follow the same pattern as our earlier examples,
only in this example, you can see we have placed the edition information
right after the title of the book. Notice that this information is in abbreviated
form – the letters “edn” stand for the word “edition” -: The edition information
is followed by a comma before the publisher of the book. So let’s look at an example.
So here is an example. Again, the reference starts with the authors’ names
followed by a comma, and then their initials. The authors’ are separated
by an ampersand. And after the last author’s initials, we have a space before the date, 2020.
Next we have the title in italics and sentence
case. The title of this book is a two part title, so again,
we would capitalise the first word of the second part of the title like we did previously.
Now, this book is in its 5th edition, and we have included this information
after the title in abbreviated form. Then after the edition information,
we have a comma, before the publication name and location - and finally, a full stop.
Now sometimes a book has been revised since its earlier published version,
but its not a new edition. This can happen when the author has made minor updates to
the content or has corrected it in some way, but these changes aren’t
substantial enough to warrant it being an entirely new edition.
Now as we mentioned at the beginning of this video,
if an ebook is available in print form, then you can reference the ebook as a
print book. The publishing details will be on the usual pages inside the ebook.
But if we’re referencing an ebook that is not available in print form,
or it’s been re-formatted in text or HTML format so that it loses the original page format view,
then we include a viewing date and a URL. Let’s break it down:
You will see here that we have all the same elements arranged in the same order as our
previous examples. The first notable difference is the Publisher element – you can see we have
the option of naming either the publisher or the sponsor. This is because some ebooks have
a sponsor rather than a publisher – if this is the case we would simply insert the sponsor name
and location (if there is one) instead of the publisher details. Then, after a comma,
we add the word “viewed” followed by the full date on which we viewed the book.
This is followed by a comma, and the URL, which you can see is in pointed brackets.
So let’s take a look at an example.
If this is the case, we include the abbreviation for “revised edition”,
denoted by the letters rev –space- edn, followed by a comma, as we have shown here.
So here is our example of an edited ebook.
After the editors’ names, we have the abbreviation of the word “editors” contained in round brackets.
This is then followed by a space and the date, and then a comma before the title.
Next, we have the Publisher name and the location of the publisher, as usual.
Then we have the word “viewed” followed by the full date, 27 August 2020 on which
we viewed the book, and this is followed by the URL which is in pointed brackets.
Now, you can see all the books we’ve talked about today have been included in this example
reference list. The reference list should always begin on a new page at the end of
your document - with the heading References in bold and centred at the top of the page.
You can see that the references have been arranged in alphabetical order,
based on the first author’s surnames. Remember to include all the works
you cited in your assignment, in your reference list at the end of your paper.
So now you know how to reference books and ebooks in Harvard style.
We hope this has been helpful. There is more information too – so don’t forget you can access
SCU’s online reference guides through a link on the library’s homepage to explore further,
and happy referencing! We’ll see you next time!