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  • 2-minute read
  • 5th December 2016

Harvard Referencing – Citing a YouTube Video

Although most of YouTube seems to be videos of cats doing stupid things, you may occasionally come across something that you want to cite in an essay. As such, in this blogpost, we’re looking at how to cite a YouTube video in Harvard referencing.

Citing a YouTube Video in Harvard Referencing

Since a YouTube video does not have an author in the conventional sense, you can instead cite the title and the year it was uploaded:

The presence of the word ‘male’ in ‘female’ is actually a coincidence (Words That Seem Related, But Aren’t, 2016).

It’s more unusual to quote a YouTube video directly, but when you can do this by giving a timestamp for the part of the video you are quoting:

According to Arika Okrent in Words That Seem Related, But Aren’t (2016, 00:00:10), ‘there’s no “male” in “female”’.

For example, the citation above shows that the quote is taken from ten seconds into the video. The reader would then be able to look up the video, skip to the cited section, and find the quoted material.

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The Reference List

Any YouTube video cited in your work should also be added to the reference list at the end of your document. The format here is as follows:

Title of Video (date uploaded) YouTube video, added by Username of uploader [Online]. Available at URL [Accessed date].

For the video cited above, for instance, the correct reference would be:

Words That Seem Related, But Aren’t (2016) YouTube video, added by Arika Okrent [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_3PNlkaKs [Accessed 8 November 2016].

A Quick Note on Harvard Referencing

Although many universities use ‘Harvard referencing’, there’s not one universally accepted version of this system. As such, you should check your style guide to confirm the format preferred by your university

Comments (7)
Lambert
6th December 2017 at 15:49
Is there a way to do this automatically through MS Word?
Reply
    ProofreadMyDoc
    11th December 2017 at 12:00
    Hi, Lambert. You can get referencing software, such as Endnote, that will insert references in Microsoft Word. But with Harvard referencing, the style may be specific to your university, so you'll need to customise the reference format to match. - PI Blog Manager
    Reply
H
30th May 2018 at 15:53
What if the uploader is interviewing the person you want to cite? How do I go about including the argument given in the interview when it wasn't said by the uplaoder?
Reply
    Proofed
    31st May 2018 at 09:30
    Hi, H. In that case, you would still cite the uploader (as this is how it would be listed in your reference list), but you would also want to name the interviewee somewhere in your text. For example, imagine you had a video uploaded by Tom Jones in which Jones is interviewing Cilla Black. If you wanted to quote something Black says in the interview, you might do it as follows: In an interview, Cilla Black says that 'Liverpool was a different place in the 1960s' (Jones, 2008, 00:24:13). Here, then, we clearly identify who we are quoting, but we also cite the source with the name of the uploader. Hope that helps!
    Reply
Taco Bill
13th June 2018 at 12:03
Thanks for posting this - it's exactly what I was looking for to help with my essay (and it gave me a much needed laugh, too!).
Reply
Antoinette Botha
21st November 2020 at 20:46
I have tried to add a youtube video as a reference in endnote. But in the reference list it does not reflect the URL and accession date despite the fact that I have added that information on endnote. how do I fix this?
Reply
    Proofed
    23rd November 2020 at 10:35
    I'm afraid we can't offer advice on Endnote, but maybe this will let you fix it: https://www.bradford.ac.uk/library/find-out-about/referencing/referencing/manually-editing-endnote-citations-or-references/
    Reply

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