Verify Harvard citations
Harvard is an author–date family with no single governing manual, so its punctuation and ordering vary between institutions — which makes it easy for an AI assistant to produce an entry that looks plausibly “Harvard” while the underlying source is wrong or invented. We check the source itself, not the formatting variant your department prefers.
Paste your Harvard reference list
Harvard reference anatomy
Author(s) (Year) 'Title', Journal, Volume(Issue), pages.
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015) 'Deep learning', Nature, 521(7553), pp. 436–444.
What goes wrong in Harvard bibliographies
- Plausible author–date entries for sources that do not exist
- Year shifted by one or two — Harvard's whole anchor is the date
- Journal or volume numbers that don't match the real record
A Harvard citation we would flag
Smith, J. and Patel, R. (2021) 'Machine learning approaches to climate modelling', Journal of Climate Informatics, 8(2), pp. 113–129.
Not found — could not locate it
No journal or article matching this title, authors and venue can be located across Crossref, OpenAlex and PubMed. We report that we could not find it — never an accusation, just a flag to check the source before relying on it.