How To Create A Harvard Style Secondary Reference

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Referencing can be an especially difficult part of writing an essay or dissertation. Once you have finished writing your work it can be a chore to then have to ensure that all the references are done in the proper manner. Still, it is worth making sure that you get your referencing correct. Not only is it important to give due credit to the authors of sources you are using, it is common for academic essays to me marked down because of poor referencing. It is highly important to make sure that the references are perfect during essay proofreading.

No matter which academic proofreading you are doing, taking care of the references in your document can be especially challenging when you need to cite a summary of another author’s work in a text you are reading. This is called secondary referencing. The question is: should you cite the author who has written the summary; or should you cite the author whose work is being summarized?

The answer is: both! But do not worry; compiling a secondary reference ...
... is not as complicated as it may sound. All you need to do is cite the author whose work is being summarized and state that the work you are referencing appears in another source. For example, if I was reading John Doe’s History of Philosophy and found a brilliant summary of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I would cite Locke but show that it appears in Doe’s work.

To cite one author whose work appears in another author’s publication all you will need is the surnames of both authors and the years that each work was published. In my example, that will be Locke (the author of the work being summarized); 1690 (the year Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published); Doe (the author of the summary); and 2013 (the year Doe’s summary was published).

If I was simply citing Locke’s work directly, my citation would look like this: (Locke, 1690). And if I was simply citing Doe’s work it would look like this: (Doe, 2013). But because I want to cite Locke’s work that is being summarized by Doe, my reference will need to show that Locke’s work is appearing in Doe’s publication. So my reference will look like this: (Locke, 1690 cited in Doe, 2013). So too, if I use Locke’s name in a sentence before inserting my citation, the reference would look like this: Enlightenment thinking developed by Locke (1690 cited in Doe, 2013, p.150) has led to modern individualism.

Creating a secondary reference using a Harvard Reference System is really quite straight forward. If you follow the basic instructions presented here, your secondary references should be fine. Of course, the highly qualified proofreaders at Proofread My Essay are well versed in the art of academic referencing. They can be relied upon to correct your referencing, whether you use Harvard or any other type of system. Our proofreading and editing team correct both the in-text references and the bibliography at the end of your document. This is all included as part of our comprehensive proofreading services, so submit your work for proofreading today!