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Harvard

Harvard is an author-date referencing style requiring an in-text citation within the text of your document and a related entry in a reference list at the end of your document.

Patent - reference list

No date: If there is no year of publication, use the abbreviation (n.d.) for no date.

Patent title: The Patent title is in italics and sentence case, i.e. capitalise the first letter of the first word and the first word after a colon. Use capitalisation for proper nouns.

For more information on reference list format and style, see General information - basics of referencing.

Format

Inventor. Date of Issue. Title of patent, Patent No. including country of issue.

Example

Hart, R. 2011. Feijoa variety named 'Kaiteri', US Patent No. 20090158474P1

Simcro Limited. 2002. Improved animal doser, NZ Patent No. 503403. 

Format 

Inventor One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Six. Date of Issue. Title of patent, Number of Patent including country of issue.

Example

Schiller, J., Frick, R. & Windmill, M. 2015. Water bike, Australian Patent No. 201953895.

List the first six authors' names, then add et al.

Format 

Inventor One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, et al. Date of Issue. Title of patent, Number of Patent including country of issue

Example

McGuire, K. S., Steinhardt, M. J., Bischoff, C. M., Sawicki, E. M., Hasenoehrl, E. J., Beck, B. J., et al. 2013. Stemmed lighting assembly with disk-shaped illumination element, Canadian Patent No. CA2834348.

Patent - in-text citations

Parenthetical citation: When you use another person’s ideas or words in your text, include the author’s name, publication date and page number/s in brackets, generally at the end of the sentence,  e.g. ... services closer to home (Bishop, 2024: 23).

Narrative citation: If you use the author’s name as part of a sentence, include the date of publication and page number/s in brackets, generally at the beginning of the sentence, e.g. Bishop (2024: 43) argued that time was ...

Parenthetical citation

The fleshy characteristics of the new variety of feijoa are depicted in the photographs accompanying the patent application (Hart 2009: sheet 3).

Narrative citation

The photographs by Hart (2009: sheet 3) depict the fleshy characteristics of the new variety of feijoa.