Is this Harvard citation generator free?

Yes, with no sign-up. Anonymous use covers 30 reference checks a day; a free Phở account raises that to 300 a month.

How do I cite a journal article in Harvard?

Paste its DOI or PubMed ID above and choose Harvard. For example, 10.1038/nature14539 becomes: LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) “Deep learning,” Nature, 521(7553), pp. 436–444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

Why does the tool change details I typed?

Because it looked the paper up and the publisher’s record disagrees. The warnings under each citation list exactly what changed, so you can check.

Harvard Referencing Generator | Phở Research Tools

Paste a DOI, PubMed ID or reference and get it in Harvard, built from the real Crossref or PubMed record so the details are right.

Harvard example

The paper Deep learning by LeCun, Bengio and Hinton (Nature, 2015), formatted by this tool from DOI 10.1038/nature14539:

LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) “Deep learning,” Nature, 521(7553), pp. 436–444. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539.

In text: (LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015)

Who uses Harvard

Most UK and Australian universities. There is no single official Harvard guide; this tool follows Cite Them Right (12th edition), the version most UK libraries use.

Harvard reference rules

Surname and initials for each author; the year in parentheses follows.
Put article titles in quotation marks, with only the first word and proper nouns capitalised.
Italicise the journal title, then volume(issue), then pp. for pages.
Add the DOI at the end; "Available at:" with an access date is for web pages without one.
Check your department’s guide: Harvard varies between universities in punctuation and the "et al." threshold.

In-text citations

Author and year in parentheses: (LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015). Add a page for quotations: (LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015, p. 437).

Common mistakes

Assuming Harvard means one fixed format. If your department publishes its own guide, it wins.
Forgetting the page number for direct quotations in the text.

How this generator avoids wrong references

Every reference is looked up in Crossref, PubMed and OpenAlex before it is formatted. When the database record disagrees with what you pasted (a year off by one, a missing co-author, pages from a different issue) the citation is built from the record and you see what changed. A paper that cannot be found is still formatted, exactly as typed, but marked as unverified, and a retracted paper is flagged in red. Always check your institution's or journal's own guidance: many add small house rules on top of the official style.

Other styles

APA 7 · MLA 9 · Chicago author-date · Vancouver · IEEE · AMA 11