Harvard referencing in Markdown

Harvard is what most British and Australian universities ask for, and it isn’t one style but a family, which is why every referencing guide disagrees with the last. Grasmere writes the form in Cite Them Right, the guide most UK universities point to, from sources you add by DOI or ISBN, while you write in Markdown.

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What comes out

In the text, author and year, with “and” rather than an ampersand, up to three authors named, and “et al.” from four:

(Field, 2019, p. 12)
(Field and Baker, 2019)
(Field, Baker and Cole, 2019)
(Field et al., 2019)

In the reference list:

Field, R. (2019) The Living Loaf: A History of Sourdough. 2nd edn. London: Riverbank Press.

Field, R. and Baker, T. (2019) ‘Wild Yeasts in Rye Starters’, Food Microbiology, 12(3), pp. 45–67. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fm.2019.01.002.

Field, R. (2026) How Sourdough Rises. Available at: https://example.com/sourdough (Accessed: 23 October 2026).

The small things that mark Harvard out are done: no comma after the year, single quotation marks round an article title, “edn.” for an edition, the place before the publisher, “Available at” and an accessed date for anything online, and “no date” where there isn’t one.

How to set it

Add your sources. Project ▸ New Source with a DOI fills in an article, an ISBN fills in a book, and a web address saves the page with its accessed date. Project ▸ Import Sources reads a BibTeX or CSL JSON export from Zotero or EndNote.
Cite by typing [@ and choosing the source. Add a page if you want one.
When you export to PDF or Word, choose Harvard under Citations. The choice is kept with the project.

In the Markdown, a citation is a link to the source’s file, [Field 2019, p. 12](../research/The%20Living%20Loaf.md). There’s no .bib file and no key to remember. See citations in Markdown without BibTeX.

Your university’s Harvard

If your department’s guide differs from Cite Them Right in some detail, the reference list is ordinary text in the exported Word file and can be edited there. The in-text form, author and year in parentheses, is the same across every Harvard variant.

Questions

Is Harvard the same as APA?

They’re close cousins, both author-date, but they differ in punctuation and in how authors and editions are written. Grasmere has both, and switching the project from one to the other rewrites every citation. See APA 7 in Markdown.

Where does the accessed date come from?

From the day the web page was saved as a source, kept as accessed: in its front matter. Change it there if you need to.

Does this work for a whole dissertation?

Yes. The Publish stage makes one PDF or Word document from a folder of chapters, with a single reference list at the end. See writing a thesis in Markdown.

Harvard, done once, for the whole dissertation.

Grasmere is a Mac app for long writing in plain Markdown files, with sources, citations, review and publishing built in. Try it free for 14 days.