Harvard referencing — Middlesex standard

The requirements

• Minimum five high-quality journal articles — count them, do not estimate
• Plus contemporary research: Dubai Airports releases, ICAO/IATA/ACI, quality press
• Every journal article carries a DOI
• Reference list in alphabetical order by author surname
• Every in-text citation appears in the list; every list entry is cited in text
• The brief permits Harvard or APA. This project uses Harvard throughout. Mixing the two is a visible defect under rubric item 8

Five journals is a floor. A report of this weight with exactly five reads as minimum compliance; eight to twelve reads as research. Track the count in 03-References/references.md continuously — it is far easier to hold than to retrofit.

In-text citations

Page numbers are required for direct quotations and strongly advised for specific claims, paraphrased arguments, and figures drawn from a particular page or table.

Reference list formats

Journal article — DOI mandatory

Surname, Initial. (Year) 'Title of article', *Journal Name*, Volume(Issue), pp. x–y.
doi:10.xxxx/xxxxx.

Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. and Berry, L.L. (1988) 'SERVQUAL: a multiple-item scale
for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality', *Journal of Retailing*, 64(1),
pp. 12–40.

If a DOI genuinely does not exist — common for older articles — give the stable URL and an accessed date, and say so rather than inventing one. Never fabricate a DOI. A wrong DOI is worse than a missing one: it is trivially checkable and reads as fabrication.

Book

Surname, Initial. (Year) *Title*. Edition. Place: Publisher.

Slack, N., Brandon-Jones, A. and Burgess, N. (2022) *Operations management*. 10th edn.
Harlow: Pearson.

Chapter in an edited book

Surname, Initial. (Year) 'Chapter title', in Editor, Initial. (ed.) *Book Title*.
Place: Publisher, pp. x–y.

Corporate press release or newsroom item — the backbone of the DXB data

Dubai Airports (2026) *DXB welcomes 95.2 million passengers in 2025*. Available at:
https://media.dubaiairports.ae/... (Accessed: 21 August 2026).

Cite the organisation as author. Give the release title in italics and the date of the release, not just the year of access.

Industry body report — ICAO, IATA, ACI, ATAG

International Civil Aviation Organization (2026) *Air transport monthly monitor*.
Montreal: ICAO. Available at: https://www.icao.int/air-traffic-monitor
(Accessed: 21 August 2026).

Airports Council International (2025) *ACI world airport traffic rankings 2024*.
Montreal: ACI World. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Spell the organisation out on first use in text — "the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)" — then abbreviate. File the reference under the full name.

Corporate webpage

Dubai Airports (2026) *Dubai World Central*. Available at:
https://dubaiairports.ae/corporate/our-story/dwc-dubai-world-central
(Accessed: 21 August 2026).

Annual report

Emirates Group (2025) *Emirates Group annual report 2024–25*. Dubai: Emirates Group.
Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Government or statutory source

Dubai Statistics Centre (2025) *Population estimates*. Dubai: Government of Dubai.
Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Newspaper or magazine

Surname, Initial. (Year) 'Article title', *Publication*, Day Month. Available at: URL
(Accessed: date).

Statistical database

Statista (2025) *Title of the statistic*. Available at: URL (Accessed: date).

Statista is an aggregator. Where it names an underlying source, cite the original and use Statista only to locate it. A reference list padded with Statista entries signals shallow research.

Data supplied by the coursework brief

The passenger and movement tables are attributed in the brief to Dubai Airports, 2026. Cite them as (Dubai Airports, 2026) and note in the methodology or a table footnote that the data were provided in the coursework brief. Where you have verified a year against the original newsroom release, cite that release directly — it is a stronger citation.

Generative AI — where declared and unadapted

Anthropic (2026) *Claude* [Large language model]. Available at: https://claude.ai
(Accessed: 21 August 2026).

The substantive disclosure belongs in the Declaration of Gen AI Use, with the prompts.

Alphabetical ordering rules

• Sort by first author surname, letter by letter
• Organisation authors sort by the first significant word: Dubai Airports under D, Airports Council International under A, The Economist under E
• Same author, multiple works: earliest year first
• Same author, same year: append a, b, c to the year and order by title
• Single-author works precede multi-author works by the same first author

Auditing a reference list

Run in order:

1. Count total references
2. Classify each: journal / book / chapter / industry report / corporate release / database / web / news
3. Journal count — at least five? Name how many more are needed
4. DOIs — does every journal article have one, correctly formatted doi:10.xxxx/...?
5. Alphabetical — is the list actually sorted, letter by letter?
6. Forward check — every in-text citation has a list entry with a matching year
7. Reverse check — every list entry is cited in text. Uncited entries look like padding
8. Consistency — Harvard throughout, no APA drift; same entry type formatted the same way
9. Plausibility — does the journal exist, does the volume align with the year, is the DOI prefix consistent with the publisher? Flag anything unconfirmable
10. Recency — traffic and capacity data should be current; methodological theory can be old. Parasuraman et al. (1988) is foundational, not stale

Report findings as a table: what is wrong, where, and the corrected form.

Common failures

• Journal article with no DOI — the most common deduction
• Reference list not alphabetised
• Harvard and APA mixed in one list
• In-text et al. used for a two-author work
• A press-release figure cited to a news article that reported it
• An uncited reference left in the list after a section was cut
• "Dubai Airports" filed under T for "The Dubai Airports"
• Fewer than five journal articles, with industry reports counted as journals to make up the number — reports are not journals and a marker will recount