Hello, and welcome to this short video prepared by Academic Skills, and today we’re going
to look at how to write a reference for a website using Harvard referencing style.
Now, in order to write our reference, we’re going to need the following information in
the following order.
First of all, we’re going to need the author’s name – just be aware this may be the name
of a person or an organisation.
Secondly, we’re going to need the year of publication.
After that, we’re going to need we’re going to need the title of the specific document
if there is one.
We’re also going to need the publisher if one appears, and then we’re going to need
the date that we actually viewed the article online, which would be today’s date.
And finally, we’re going to need to copy in the URL of the website that we are accessing
it.
So, let’s have a look at a website that we want to use in our assignment.
Now, first of all we’re going to need to find the name of the author.
Now, in this case we can find it not far from the top and in this case it’s a person – Samantha
Morris.
Just be aware that sometimes this may the name of an organisation.
Next, we’re going to need the year of publication.
If we can’t find it at the top, it’s always a good idea to look down towards the bottom
of the website where there is a lot of information, and here if we look around we’ll find that
it is in fact produced in 2017.
So that is the year that we will use.
Next, we’re going to need the title of the specific document, which should appear at
the top, and here we have it – ‘Gold Coast’s best camping spots’.
Next, we’re going to try and find the publisher if this is applicable.
We can look around the top, but if we don’t find it there again it is probably best practice
to look towards the bottom and see if there is a publisher listed there, and as you can
see we have ‘Destination Gold Coast’ as the publishers.
The next piece of information we need is the date that we viewed the article, so we would
write in today’s date for that particular piece of information.
And finally, in the top browsing bar we will copy the full URL of the website to copy into
our referencing list.
So, now that we have that information we’ve just gathered it into this list so that we
can see where it is and which order that we will use it.
So, first of all we’ll need the author’s name – in this case it was Samantha Morris,
so we will take the author’s surname and the initial, so that will be ‘Morris, S’.
Next comes the year of publication, ‘2017’.
After a comma we will go on to the title of the web page, and notice that this is in italics.
The other thing to notice is that only the first letter of the sentence and any proper
nouns such as Gold Coast are in capitals here.
After a comma we have the name of the publisher, in this case ‘Destination Gold Coast’,
and finally or next, nearly finally, we have the date of our access, and we write it in
this format – always ‘viewed’, always the number of the day, the full name of the
month, and the year – no punctuation.
After a comma, our last piece of information is the URL copied.
Just notice that we have encased it in those brackets as well.
And now our reference is ready to go, we have a full stop at the end of course.
Also remember all of our reference lists start on a new page and start with the bold, centred
title ‘References’.
We hope this has been very useful, and good luck with all of your referencing.