Preprint: how to cite in Harvard style?

Create a spot-on reference in Harvard

Select a source type:

General rules

A preprint is a publication, most often of a scientific nature, with which its author seeks showing their achievements or ideas to a range of users. A preprint precedes the subsequent fully fledged publication (an article in a scholarly journal or a book).

If you wish referencing a preprint of an article that has not yet been published in a scholarly journal and can be accessed on a specialised preprint service in accordance with the Harvard citation style, use the following template:

Author(s), (year). Title [online]. [Preprint]. [Viewed date viewed]. Available from: doi: DOI

For a preprint with no DOI available from an ordinary URL address, modify the corresponding element of the reference as follows:

Available from: URL

See in more detail about how to indicate the DOI and URL addresses in this article.

If you wish referencing a preprint of a book to be published with a publishing house, use this template:

Author(s), (year). Title. City: Publisher. [Preprint].

For a book preprint available online, use the appropriate online source elements from the first template.

For the rules of indicating authors' names in a bibliographic reference according to the rules of the Harvard style, see this article.

Examples in a list of references

Hausburg, M., Banton, K. L., Roshon, M. and Bar-Or, D., (2020). Clinically distinct COVID-19 cases share strikingly similar immune response progression: a follow-up analysis [online]. [Preprint]. [Viewed 13 January 2021]. Available from: doi: 10.1101/2020.09.16.20115972

Mann, P., Smith, A., Mitchell, J. and Dobson, S., (2020). Cooperative coinfection dynamics on clustered networks [online]. [Preprint]. [Viewed 13 January 2021]. Available from: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09457

Other citation styles: