Referencing for UON Partners

Overview

There are a variety of referencing styles in use at the University of Northampton, including Harvard, the predominant style, and also subject specific styles such as APA, OSCOLA, MHRA and MLA. We maintain the Subject Referencing Styles web page showing which referencing styles are currently in use for which subject. Students are always advised to check with their tutor if there is a specific style they should use. 

Advice for Marking Referencing

Academic staff are advised to mark referencing for style consistency and accuracy, rather than whether a particular referencing style variant has been used, providing their is no conflict with a subject professional specification (for example, OSCOLA or APA). By "accuracy" we mean referencing that enables the reader to easily and unambiguously locate the source used.

Marking and Accessibility Issues

Academics are advised to be open to making reasonable adjustments for students who struggle with a particular referencing style. For example, to enable them to use Cite Them Right Vancouver rather than Cite Them Right Harvard, providing this does not conflict with a referencing style required by a professional body, e.g. OSCOLA or APA.  This is because some students find "name and date" systems, such as Harvard, disrupt the flow of the text (Watkins, 2023).

Reference

Watkins, F. (2023) 'Do institutional or subject referencing style choices create barriers for students with Specific Learning Disability?', Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, 29 Available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi29.1094.

Changes to Referencing from Sept 2025

• From September 2025, for those programmes that currently use Harvard, the University will be moving to Cite Them Right Harvard.  This will replace UON Harvard, which is being phased out. However, returning students are being advised they can continue using UON Harvard for the duration of their programme, if they prefer, and the UON Harvard guidance is still available on our web pages, along with our old guidance for other referencing systems (e.g. MLA, OSCOLA).
• In addition, we will also be moving to online guides provided by the Cite Them Right platform.  This platform provides comprehensive referencing guidance for Harvard, but also for the referencing styles overseen by governing organisations: APA 7th, OSCOLA, IEEE, Vancouver MHRA 3rd, MHRA 4th, MLA 9th, Chicago 18th, and Chicago 17th.

There are four main reasons that we are adopting Cite Them Right Harvard and a move to the Cite Them Right Platform:

1. Cite Them Right Harvard appears as an output format across all the main reference management tools, such as RefWorks, Mendeley, MyBib, and Zotero. This will enable our students to reap the time saving benefits of using these tools.
2. Harvard referencing has no central governing body, unlike some of the subject specific styles, such as APA and OSCOLA. This means that there are more than 100 Harvard referencing style variants. However, Cite Them Right Harvard is now used by many UK universities, which provides some inter-institutional consistency.
3. Cite Them Right Harvard incorporates the use of DOIs (digital object identifiers), enabling academics to more easily verify if a reference is real or fabricated (e.g. an AI hallucination).
4. The time taken for Academic Librarians and Learning Development tutors to maintain in-house referencing guides takes them away from providing direct support to students. 

Most programmes at the University use Harvard, and to help with the transition we have created a comparison table for students and staff so that you can easily see the core differences between Cite Them Right Harvard and UON Harvard.