Elsevier Harvard references and in-text citations from a DOI, ISBN, URL or title, with the rules explained. Export the list to Word.
Let’s cite!
Paste a DOI, ISBN, PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or just a title. Your list is saved in this browser, so you can close the tab and come back to it.
Formatted by citeproc-js © Frank Bennett, unmodified, under the CPAL — citeproc-js implements the Citation Style Language. Styles from the CSL project, CC BY-SA 3.0 (our copies).
Paste a DOI, an ISBN, a link or a title and the tool finds the publisher's own record for it and formats it in Elsevier Harvard — the author–date system used in Elsevier journals across the sciences, engineering, business and the social sciences. The references entry and the in-text citation come together, and the rules are those of the Elsevier's author guidelines for journals using its Harvard reference style (with article titles), published by Elsevier, for the journals in its portfolio that use author–date references. The style is defined in each journal's Guide for Authors and has been stable for many years.
Elsevier's Guide for Authors for each journal is the authority; the reference style section is usually a few lines with examples.
Three steps, about twenty seconds a source.
A DOI, an ISBN, a PubMed or arXiv ID, a web address, or a title. Elsevier Harvard is already selected on this page. The tool works out what you pasted and asks the right catalogue — Crossref, OpenLibrary, PubMed, DataCite or Semantic Scholar — for the record.
Each source gets a card showing what the catalogue held and what the tool changed to fit Elsevier Harvard: a title converted to sentence case, a DOI reduced to its bare form, a page range tidied. Every change can be undone with one click if the record was right as it was.
Copy the list with its formatting into Word or Google Docs, or download a .docx with the hanging indent and spacing already set. BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON exports carry the same data into Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or LaTeX.
The rules the tool applies, from the Elsevier's author guidelines for journals using its Harvard reference style (with article titles).
Six real sources — two journal articles, a book, a chapter, a web page and a conference paper — formatted by the same engine that runs the generator above. Nothing here was typed by hand, so what you see is what you get.
AI Writing Assistant, n.d. Free AI writing tools: What each does and when to use it [WWW Document]. AI Writing Assistant. URL https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html (accessed 9.18.26).
In text: (AI Writing Assistant, n.d.)
Golder, S.A., Macy, M.W., 2011. Diurnal and seasonal mood vary with work, sleep, and daylength across diverse cultures. Science 333, 1878–1881. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1202775
In text, citing page 1880: (Golder and Macy, 2011, p. 1880)
Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic and conversation, in: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41–58.
In text, citing page 45: (Grice, 1975, p. 45)
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J.L., Thaler, R.H., 1991. Anomalies: The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias. Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.5.1.193
In text: (Kahneman et al., 1991)
Kuhn, T.S., 2012. The structure of scientific revolutions, 4th ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
In text, citing page 12: (Kuhn, 2012, p. 12)
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A.N., Kaiser, Ł., Polosukhin, I., 2017. Attention is all you need, in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30. Curran Associates, pp. 5998–6008.
In text: (Vaswani et al., 2017)
The publishers' records hold 6 of these titles in title case; the tool converted them to sentence case, as Elsevier Harvard requires, and reported each change on its card, where one click keeps the original instead.
Five errors markers see most often, and what the tool does about each.
Elsevier writes Golder, S.A., Macy, M.W., 2011. — commas and a period, no brackets. That is what tells it apart from Cite Them Right Harvard.
The list separates every author with a comma only; and appears in the text.
Elsevier Harvard gives the volume and pages only.
S.A. is closed up, not S. A.
That phrase is Cite Them Right's. Elsevier writes URL followed by the address.
If your handbook names one of these instead, its page opens the generator with that style selected.
Cite Them Right Harvard, the UK university version, puts the year in parentheses, quotes article titles and writes Available at: and (Accessed: …). Open the Harvard page.
APA is the author–date style with an ampersand and a comma after the author in the text; Elsevier journals that do not use Harvard often use APA or a numbered style. Open the APA page.
Yes. Every style, every source type and every export is free, with no account and no daily allowance, because the formatting runs in your browser rather than on our servers. Your list is saved in this browser and never sent to us.
The version with article titles, as most Elsevier journals now require. A few journals use the older variant without article titles; their Guide for Authors says which.
The surname and year with a comma between them: (Kuhn, 2012). The tool prints the in-text form under each reference; turn on the in-text switch above the list if it is hidden.
Paste the address and the tool reads the page's title, author, site name and date where the page declares them, then formats it. The Elsevier Harvard form of a web page with an organisation as author and no date is: AI Writing Assistant, n.d. Free AI writing tools: What each does and when to use it [WWW Document]. AI Writing Assistant. URL https://www.aiwritingassistant.net/tools.html (accessed 9.18.26). Check the author and date on the card — pages often leave them out, and the style has a rule for each case.
Yes. Your sources are stored as data, not as formatted text, so choosing another style in the picker re-formats the whole list at once — APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, or any of the 10,000 Citation Style Language styles the picker searches.
From the Elsevier's author guidelines for journals using its Harvard reference style (with article titles), published by Elsevier, for the journals in its portfolio that use author–date references, as encoded in the open Citation Style Language style the tool uses. Elsevier's Guide for Authors for each journal is the authority; the reference style section is usually a few lines with examples. Where your department's own guide differs on a detail, the department's guide is the one your marker reads.
Check the essay's grammar, tighten the wording, or summarise a source before you cite it. One plan covers every tool.
Each page opens the generator with that style already selected, shows what the tool prints for six real sources, and explains the style's rules. The picker above the list reaches more than 10,000 styles in all.
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