Leeds Harvard vs Cite Them Right: What Actually Differs

Leeds Harvard and Cite Them Right are two different versions of Harvard referencing, and a reference list formatted in one will be marked as inconsistent under the other. The visible giveaway is the year: Cite Them Right wraps it in round brackets, Leeds Harvard writes it bare between full stops. This guide shows both formats side by side for books, journal articles and websites, lists every difference that affects your reference list, and gives you a checklist for converting one into the other.

Why two versions of Harvard exist

"Harvard" is a family of author-date styles with no governing body and no official manual. Nobody owns it, so every institution that adopts it has to decide the punctuation details for itself. Most UK universities solve this by adopting Cite Them Right, the guide by Richard Pears and Graham Shields published by Bloomsbury: Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham, Westminster and the Open University all point students to it, either as the book or through the Cite Them Right Online subscription. Our guide to Harvard referencing style follows the same source.

The University of Leeds went the other way. Its library maintains a house variant, stating plainly that "the University uses a variation of the Harvard referencing style called Leeds Harvard." The library publishes its own examples pages, crib sheets and EndNote style files, and markers at Leeds check against those.

The result is a trap for anyone who arrives mid-degree or starts a postgraduate course. Under a popular Harvard tutorial on YouTube, one commenter wrote: "I'm pursuing my master's in the University of Leeds. I just learnt that we are required to reference in Leeds Harvard style so here I am!" That is the standard discovery route: you learn generic Harvard, then find out your university grades against a specific version of it. The two styles agree on what goes into a reference. They disagree, precisely and consistently, on how it is punctuated.

A note on scope: Leeds Beckett is a separate university with its own referencing guidance. "Leeds Harvard" in this guide means the University of Leeds style.

The differences at a glance

Every row in this table is drawn from the University of Leeds library's current examples pages and from Cite Them Right as our Harvard journal article guide documents it.

In-text citations are a different story: the two styles are nearly interchangeable there, as covered below. The reference list is where the marks are won and lost.

Worked examples side by side

Each pair below formats the same real source both ways. The Leeds versions come from the Leeds library's own examples pages; the Cite Them Right versions apply that guide's templates to the same sources.

1. Book with one author

Cite Them Right (12th edition):

Adams, A.D. (1906) Electric transmission of water power. New York: McGraw.

Leeds Harvard:

Adams, A.D. 1906. Electric transmission of water power. New York: McGraw.

In-text, both styles: (Adams, 1906) or Adams (1906).

One character pair separates the two references: the brackets around the year. This is the difference to scan for first when you are handed an unfamiliar reference list, because it identifies the variant instantly.

2. Book with two authors and an edition

Cite Them Right (12th edition):

Finch, E. and Fafinski, S. (2015) Legal skills. 5th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leeds Harvard:

Finch, E. and Fafinski, S. 2015. Legal skills. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In-text, both styles: (Finch and Fafinski, 2015).

Both styles write "and" between authors rather than an ampersand, and both state the edition only when it is later than the first. The abbreviation differs: Cite Them Right writes "edn." and Leeds writes "ed." Small, mechanical, and exactly the kind of thing a marker checking against the Leeds crib sheet will circle.

3. Edited book

Cite Them Right (12th edition):

Wexler, P., van der Kolk, J., Mohapatra, A. and Agarwal, R. (eds.) (2012) Chemicals, environment, health. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Leeds Harvard:

Wexler, P., van der Kolk, J., Mohapatra, A. and Agarwal, R. eds. 2012. Chemicals, environment, health. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

In-text, both styles: (Wexler et al., 2012), because there are three or more names.

Leeds places "eds." directly after the final name with no brackets. Cite Them Right brackets the role as "(eds.)" before the year. Both list every editor in the reference even though the citation collapses to "et al."

4. Journal article with a DOI

Cite Them Right (12th edition):

Pajunen, K. (2008) 'Institutions and inflows of foreign direct investment: a fuzzy-set analysis', Journal of International Business Studies, 39(4), pp. 652-669. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400371

Leeds Harvard:

Pajunen, K. 2008. Institutions and inflows of foreign direct investment: a fuzzy-set analysis. Journal of International Business Studies. [Online]. 39(4), pp.652-669. [Accessed 3 April 2024]. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400371

The journal article is where the two variants diverge most, and it is worth reading the differences off one by one:

• Cite Them Right puts the article title in 'single quotation marks' with a comma after the closing quote. Leeds uses no quotation marks and ends the title with a full stop.
• Leeds inserts "[Online]." after the journal title for anything you read electronically. Cite Them Right has no equivalent marker.
• Leeds prints the volume number in bold. In a word processor that means actually applying bold formatting to "39" and nothing else.
• Leeds requires the accessed date even though the reference carries a DOI, and places it before the URL in square brackets. Cite Them Right omits the accessed date whenever a DOI is present, on the logic that a DOI is permanent.
• Leeds also requires the journal title written out in full. Abbreviated journal titles, standard in some science styles such as ACS, are ruled out.

In-text, both styles: (Pajunen, 2008).

5. Website or webpage

Cite Them Right (12th edition):

Robinson, J. (2007) Social variation across the UK. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/social-variation-across-the-uk (Accessed: 21 November 2021).

Leeds Harvard:

Robinson, J. 2007. Social variation across the UK. [Online]. [Accessed 21 November 2021]. Available from: https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/social-variation-across-the-uk

The accessed date swaps ends of the reference. Cite Them Right closes with "(Accessed: date)." after the URL; Leeds front-loads "[Accessed date]." before "Available from:". Where a page has a corporate author rather than a person, both styles put the organisation in the author position: the Leeds examples include "Environment Agency. 2013." formatted exactly like a personal author.

One rule the Leeds guide states outright for web sources: "Do not include the URL of the website in your citation." The in-text citation stays (Robinson, 2007) in both styles; URLs live only in the reference list.

In-text citations: where the two styles agree

If your work is already cited in one style and you discover you need the other, the in-text layer usually survives untouched. Both Leeds Harvard and Cite Them Right:

• cite author surname and year: (Pajunen, 2008), or Pajunen (2008) when the name is part of your sentence
• give both names for two authors: (Ahmed and Meehan, 2012)
• collapse three or more authors to the first name plus "et al." from the first citation: (Jones et al., 2011), while the reference list still names every author
• add a page number when you quote directly or paraphrase a specific passage: (Finch and Fafinski, 2015, p.102)
• distinguish two works by the same author in the same year with letters: Jones (1998a) and Jones (1998b)
• write "and" between names in citations, never "&"

The Leeds guide adds a useful clarification for anyone writing a literature review: include page numbers when you paraphrase specific ideas or reproduce an image, diagram or table, and cite without them when you summarise a whole work. Students writing narrative syntheses ask about this constantly. A recent r/UniUK thread put it exactly: the writer knew to cite "(author; year)" in the introduction but was unsure how much to repeat once the discussion turned narrative. The rule in both variants is the same: every claim traceable to a source carries a citation, but once a source is cited in a paragraph, following sentences that clearly continue the same point can refer to the author by name alone. Cite the year again when you start a new paragraph, bring in another source, or return to the work later.

Special cases

No author

Check for a corporate author first: a government agency, company or organisation counts as an author in both styles, so "Environment Agency" or "World Health Organization" fills the author slot. If there is genuinely no individual or corporate author, the styles split. The Leeds guide says "it is acceptable to use 'Anon' in your reference." Cite Them Right instead moves the title into the author position, so the reference and the citation both begin with the title.

No date

Leeds Harvard writes "[no date]" in the reference and cites as Jones (no date). Where an item carries only a copyright year, Leeds prefixes it with c: "c2008". Cite Them Right handles the same situation with "no date" in the year position. Either way, resist guessing a year; an honest "no date" is verifiable, a guessed year is an error a marker can check.

Secondary referencing

When you read about one author's work inside another author's book, both styles cite both and reference only the source you actually held. The Leeds format for the citation is:

(Jones, 1998, cited in Carol, 2001, p.9)

Only Carol 2001 appears in the reference list. This rule is identical in Cite Them Right, and in both cases the better move, where possible, is to find and read the original so you can cite it directly.

Same author, same year

Both styles append lower-case letters to the year: Jones (1998a), Jones (1998b). The letters appear in both the citation and the reference so the reader can pair them up.

Cite Them Right 12th vs 13th edition

Cite Them Right itself moved between editions recently, which matters because "use Cite Them Right" now means slightly different things depending on which edition your library links to. The 13th edition (2025) made one change that shows up in almost every reference list: the place of publication is no longer included for books, so a 12th edition reference like

Bell, J. (2014) Doing your research project. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

becomes

Bell, J. (2014) Doing your research project. Open University Press.

The 13th edition also added guidance for citing AI-generated content and simplified "article number" to "article" for journals that number articles instead of paginating issues. Everything else carried over from the 12th edition unchanged.

Leeds Harvard is unaffected by this: the Leeds guide still requires place of publication, in the "Place: Publisher" form. If you are converting a Cite Them Right 13th edition reference to Leeds Harvard, you will need to look the place of publication back up, usually from the book's copyright page or its library catalogue record.

Converting Cite Them Right to Leeds Harvard

Generated or copied a Cite Them Right reference and need it in Leeds Harvard? Work through this list in order. Every step is mechanical except the last one.

1. Remove the brackets around the year and put a full stop on each side: "(2008)" becomes ". 2008."
2. Strip the single quotation marks from article and chapter titles, and change the comma after the title to a full stop.
3. For online sources, insert "[Online]." after the journal title or the work's title.
4. Embolden the journal volume number.
5. Close up "pp. " to "pp." before the page range.
6. Change "Available at:" to "Available from:".
7. Move the accessed date before the URL and change its form from "(Accessed: 3 April 2024)" to "[Accessed 3 April 2024]." Add one for DOI'd articles, where Cite Them Right had none.
8. Change "edn." to "ed." for editions, and "(eds.)" to "eds." after editor names.
9. If the reference came from the 13th edition and the source is a book, restore the place of publication before the publisher.

The reverse conversion is the same list run backwards, with step 9 replaced by deleting the place of publication if your university has moved to the 13th edition.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

Mixing the two variants in one reference list. The most common failure, and the easiest for a marker to spot: bracketed years on half the references and bare years on the other half, usually because references were collected from two different generators over several weeks. Pick the variant your school specifies and convert everything to it in one pass at the end.

Following a generic "Harvard" tutorial at a university with a house variant. Most Harvard tutorials online teach Cite Them Right conventions without saying so. If you are at Leeds, check everything against the library's own examples pages; that is what your work is marked against.

Losing the bold on the volume number. Pasting a Leeds Harvard reference through a plain-text editor, a form field or some reference managers silently strips the bold from the volume. Re-check formatting after every paste.

Writing "Available at:" in a Leeds reference. One word, and spellcheck will never catch it. A find for "Available at" across your document takes seconds and catches every instance.

Adding an accessed date where Cite Them Right omits it, or dropping it where Leeds requires it. The rule to remember: Cite Them Right trusts a DOI and skips the date; Leeds records the date for every online source, DOI or no DOI.

Citing a URL in the text. Both styles keep URLs out of in-text citations entirely. The citation is author and year; the reference list carries the address.

Which version should you use?

The decision is made for you, and the answer lives in your module handbook or your library's referencing page, never in a tutorial's comment section. At the University of Leeds, use Leeds Harvard. At a university that names Cite Them Right, use Cite Them Right, and note which edition the library links to. If your handbook says only "Harvard" with no named guide, Cite Them Right is the defensible default: it is the closest thing UK Harvard has to a standard, it is the version most libraries subscribe to, and a marker who cares about a stricter local variant will have named it. Whichever version you land on, consistency across the whole reference list matters more than the choice itself; the same is true when choosing between whole style families.

The situation to be careful with is switching universities or moving from undergraduate to postgraduate study. Referencing habits from the old institution follow you, and the differences in this guide are exactly the ones that surface. An hour spent converting your personal reference template pays for itself across every submission that follows.

Format either version in seconds

You now know the two variants well enough to tell them apart from the year alone, and to convert between them by hand. The AllCitations Harvard generator outputs Cite Them Right: paste a DOI, ISBN or URL and it returns the formatted reference, free and without an account. For Leeds Harvard, generate the Cite Them Right version and run the nine-step conversion above; the facts in the reference stay identical, and the punctuation changes are mechanical once you know them.