How to reference a book using Harvard referencing style

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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.
The remainder of this video transcript can be read on the embedded video at: scu.edu.au/learning-zone/how-to-videos/