Create a spot-on reference in Harvard
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