Harvard Referencing Style
Harvard Style, which is one of the most common referencing styles, just after APA and MLA, entails various aspects that must be taken into consideration for a piece of work presented to be considered as organized in Harvard Style. The core areas under consideration as the outline, the in-text citation, and the reference page.
Harvard Style Outline
For a paper to be considered as organized in Harvard style, the following basic structure elements must be in place:
Title Page
The title page should have the title of the paper (IN CAPITAL), positioned at about a third from the top of the page. Two lines beneath the title of the paper are the name of the author, after which several lines are skipped to about two-thirds from the top of the page, where the other details indicated are Course, Name of Professor, University, City (State), then Date.
Headers Formatting
The title of the paper should appear on all the pages at the header, next to the page number that is placed at the top right corner of the paper.
Heading and Seriation
The heading system in Harvard takes the form of various levels, just like in APA. Level-1 headers are centered, bold and title case; the level-2 headers are bold, flush left, and title case; level-3 headers are left aligned, indented half-inch from the margins, followed by a full-stop, and the sentences start immediately on the same line. Also, while the entire text in the paper is flush left apart from the headers, the paragraphs in level one and two have an indentation, half-inch from the margin.
Referencing
In-text Citation
Where any information that is not original appears, like any other formatting style, the writer should give credit to the source by putting an in-text citation. There are two ways to do in-text citation: by putting the details in the bracket of by having the details of the sentence, in either way, the details include the surname of the author(s), followed by the year of publication, and a page number, if need be. The examples are as shown:
Citation at the end of the sentence. Obesity in children is mainly caused by too much intake of junk food (Green 2016).
Citation within the sentence. As Green (2016) asserts, obesity in children is mainly caused by too much intake of junk food.
Reference Page (Bibliography)
The reference page in Harvard is formatted on the type of material used as the source. However, in general, the details in the respective references include the names of the author (Surname, and initials of other names), the year of publication (not in brackets like the case of APA), the title of the source, publisher, and the city of publication. The variations that may arise include the source, number of authors, no authors, among others.
Conclusion
Essentially, the key areas to take into consideration in Harvard referencing are the outline of the pages, the heading system, in-text citation, formatting of the references in the reference page, and the title page.
