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Harvard Solent Referencing Guide

In-text references

You can refer to the work of others in several ways within your assignment:

  1. Short quote – enclose in quotation marks within your sentence.
  2. Long quote – start on a new line, use single spacing and indent.
  3. Paraphrase – put another person’s ideas into your own words.
  4. Summarise – sum up a large piece of content (e.g. a book, journal article)

All of these must include a reference to your original source by inserting the author’s surname, year of publication and page number(s) if appropriate within your sentence. If you have quoted (or paraphrased a particular short section) you should include the page number(s); if you are summarising a large section or the entire work, you do not need to include a page number.


Examples of in-text reference options:

Author surname appears in the body of your sentence – just add the year [and page(s) if appropriate] after the name where it occurs.

As Smith (2013, p.16) states, all resources must be referenced.


Author surname is not given within the sentence – include the surname, year [and page(s) if appropriate] in brackets at the end of the content you are writing that draws on your source.

It has been stated that all resources used to support your arguments must be included in your reference list (Smith 2013, p.16).

If your source has multiple authors, a corporate author or no author, see the relevant guidance to identify how to format these in your in-text references and full reference list.

Every unique source that you include an in-text reference for must have a full reference included in your reference list so your reader can locate the source you are referring to.

Referencing more than one source in the same sentence

If you wish to refer to more than one author or source to back up or illustrate a point you are making, you need to include the author/s, date of publication and page number/s [if appropriate] for each source.

In-text reference examples

If citing directly:

Gazzard (2013) and Wade (2016) focus on the historical scope of British games while Mac Sithigh (2014) and Woodcock (2016) explore contemporary policy and industrial contexts for games within the UK.

If citing indirectly:

It is also arguable that nurse education, along with much of Higher Education generally, is dominated by an instrumentalist ideology (Collini 2011; Goodman 2012; Roggero 2011). This is the first step, acknowledging our ‘prejudices’.

Reference list format

You would then include a full reference for each source within the reference list, following the format guidance for that particular source.

Video guide to in-text citations

The Referencing video, which is also embedded below, gives an overview of referencing, including how to build and use in-text citations appropriately:

We have also produced a written version of this guide using the script of the video which you can access below as a PDF: