What is the difference between the Harvard and the Vancouver systems of referencing?

Answer 1

The Harvard referencing system is an author-date style, where in-text citations include the author's surname and the year of publication, while the reference list is organized alphabetically by the authors' last names. In contrast, the Vancouver system uses a numerical format for in-text citations, where sources are cited with numbers corresponding to their order of appearance in the reference list, which is also numbered. This makes Vancouver more concise in the text but can be less informative at a glance compared to Harvard’s author-date approach. Both systems aim to provide clear attribution to sources, but they do so in different formats.