Harvard Referencing Guide

You must include page number(s) in the in-text citation when incorporating a direct quotation into a sentence. Use single quotation marks to enclose short quotations (sentence fragments, a sentence or sentences with less than 30 words). Fit quotations within your sentences, making sure the sentences are grammatically correct.

Examples

When Ladkin (2011:1136) suggests that knowledge of tourism and hospitality labour ‘clearly has a contribution to make to current wider societal debates’ she is, as we are, reflecting on the shifting phenomenon of hospitality work.

There seems to be a 'consensus among researchers and policy makers that experiments constitute a gold standard in policy evaluation, although they are not a complete recipe for policy evaluation’ (Danielson 2007:381–382).

Citing a block quote

A direct quote that is more than 30 words long is usually indented from the text margin in a block format and use one size smaller font in single line spacing. Quotation marks are not needed.

Examples

New institutional studies of organisations in the 1970s and 1980s are largely characterised by an emphasis on diffusion, isomorphism, and decoupling:

The new institutionalism in organisation theory and sociology comprises a rejection of rational-actor models, and interest in institutions as independent variables, a turn towards cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties of supra individual units of analysis that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individuals' attributes or motives (DiMaggio and Powell 1991:8).

Modifying a direct quote

Ellipsis

If you need to omit a word or words from a quote, indicate this with an ellipsis (three dots) with a space before and after the ellipsis ( . ). A direct quote should neither start nor end with an ellipsis. Words should only be omitted from a quote if they are superfluous to the reason why you are using the quote and the meaning of the quote is not affected by the change.

For example (in a block quote):

The modernist view of the individual voice has been debated:

As with an early modernist like Lautréamont . the subject or “character” is always an unstable collective, perpetually on the make, on trial and in degeneration, as much as it is in productive process, riven by contradiction and interruption, and by virtue of the textual mosaic, it hosts a crazed polyphony with no “originary” voice (Campbell 2014:157).

Square brackets

If you need to add a word or words to a quote, or change the capitalisation of a word to fit with your syntax, put the word(s)/letter in square brackets [ ]. Words should only be added to a quote for explanatory reasons (e.g. a name might be added to explain who a pronoun is referencing).

For example:

The church is not the only setting where the soul may be nurtured, as '[t]he soul also finds sustenance in more domestic settings, like the family home' (Jones 1998:89).

Sic

If you need to indicate a misspelling, grammatical error or lack of inclusive language, insert the word [sic] (meaning so or thus) in square brackets immediately following the error but do not change the error in the quote.