how to harvard reference paraphrasing

Harvard referencing handbook (2nd edition)

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Quoting, paraphrasing and summarising

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You need to give an in-text citation whenever you quote, paraphrase or summarise an information source.

Click on the options below for more information.

• Paraphrasing
• Summarising

Quoting is copying a short section of text, word for word, directly from an information source into your work. 

1.  Short quotes should:

• have double quotation marks at the beginning and end of the text
• be followed with the in-text citation
• have ellipses (...) if you omit part of the text.

An example of a short quotation:

...it has frequently been identified that "the search for unattainable perfect could mean missing deadlines" (Williams and Reid, 2011, 94).  The implication of this is...​

2. Long quotations are generally longer than two lines.  You should:

• start the quotation on a new line
• indent the quotation
• follow the quotation with the in-text citation
• start your analysis of the quotation on a new line

An example of a long quotation:

When discussing your findings it is essential that you follow a pattern:

"The important point to remember is that in your review you should present a logical argument...justifying both the need for work and the methodology that is going to be used" (Ridley, 2012, 100).

Without this structure you will struggle to...

Paraphrasing is when you put a short section of text from an information source into your own words.  Although the words are your own, you are still using ideas from the original text.  You must acknowledge the source with an in-text citation.

Summarising gives a broad overview of an information source.  It describes the main ideas in your own words.  You must acknowledge the source with an in-text citation.

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Harvard Referencing

• Summarising/Paraphrasing
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Summarising

Summarising involves repeating the main ideas of a passage in your own words.  A summary concentrates on the important points rather than the details.

Original text

'... in order to learn consumers' views on beauty, Dove surveyed girls and women in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.  Some of the results were disturbing; for example, in Britain, more than half of those surveyed said their bodies "disgusted" them.  Six out of ten girls believed they would be happier if they were thinner, but actually fewer than two out of ten were in fact overweight.  Apparently, fashion's images of artificially curvaceous models and celebrities had wreaked not a little havoc on young self-concepts.'

Example of a summary   (1)

The results of a recent survey by Dove of girls and women in Britain indicated that many of the younger respondants had negative attitudes to their bodies and wanted to be thinner, even though a large proportion of them were not overweight (Rath, Bay, Petrizzi & Gill 2008, p. 139).

OR  (2)

Rath, Bay, Petrizzi and Gill (2008, p. 139) report that the results of a survey by Dove of young girls and women in Britain indicate that many young girls have false ideas about whether they are overweight or not. 

Summarising a substantial section or chapter of a book or a complete book: 

The Nazis attempted to control fashions in order to communicate a wide range of propoganda messages (Guenther 2004).

  OR  (3)

In a recent book, Guenther (2004) demonstrates the ways in which the Nazis used women's fashions to strengthen certain images of their ideal world.

Points to note :

There are different ways you can incorporate an in-text citation into your work. Usually, the author's surname/s, the date and page numbers (if necessary) appear in brackets - as in (1) above, but if you want to use the author's name/s  as part of your sentance you can do so as in examples (2) and (3) above.

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is expressing what an author writes in another way. 

'For the times when silk stocking were not be had "for love or money," women had to make do.'

Example of a paraphrase

As Kirkham (2005, p. 221) points out, during the War there were times when silk stockings could not be obtained by any means and so women were forced to find alternatives.

During the War, when silk stockings were often not available at all, women were forced to find alternatives (Kirkham 2005, p. 221).

'A lifecycle inventory study confirmed that the use of the b-pak produces lower environmental burdens than a glass wine bottle.'

A b-pak is a more environmentally friendly container for wine than the traditional bottle (Evans 2007, p. 130).

As Evans (2007, p. 130) points out, the b-pak has a smaller environmental impact than a traditional wine bottle.

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Harvard Style

• Position of the citation
• Secondary Referencing
• Date of Publication
• Page numbers
• Citing from Web pages
• Paraphrasing and Summarising
• Examples of References in Harvard style
• Harvard Reference Examples A-Z
• Setting the Bibliographic Style
• Inserting In-text Citations
• How to create a Reference List
• Managing Sources
• Editing Citations
• Updating your Reference list
• Find Sources
• Evaluate Sources
• Write the Reference
• Write the Annotation
• Examples of Annotations

Paraphrasing

To paraphrase is to communicate the author’s work in your own words and to acknowledge the source:

• Used to rewrite text in your own words
• Used to clarify meaning
• Used to shorten a longer statement, but keep the main ideas
• Giving credit to the original author of the idea

Elements of a good paraphrase:

• Change the structure of the original passage
• Change the words
• Give a citation / reference

Summarising

To summarise is to describe broadly the findings of a study without directly quoting from it.  Summarising involves repeating the main ideas of a passage in your own words.  A summary concentrates on the important points rather than the details.

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Harvard Referencing - SETU Libraries Waterford Guide: Paraphrasing and Direct Quotations

• SETU Waterford Libraries Harvard Referencing Basics

Paraphrasing and Direct Quotations

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Essay excerpt

Dublin is the capital of Ireland. The Discover Ireland website (Fáilte Ireland, 2013) outlines some of the main tourist attractions in Dublin. The city is ‘small, easy to get around and offers no greater challenge than struggling to be cultural the morning after the night before’ (Davenport, 2010, p. 16). Dublin aims to encourage sustainable tourism and members of the public can help by altering behaviour patterns (Miller et al ., 2010).

Paraphrase or Summary

When you paraphrase or summarise you express somebody else's ideas or theories in your own words.

Paraphrasing is not a direct quote, so there is no need to include quotation marks or page numbers. List the name(s) of the author(s) and the date of publication directly after the paraphrase. Example (see above): Miller et al., 2010.

Direct Quote

A Direct Quote is when you take an actual segment of text from another source and reproduce it word for word in your assignment.

Short quotations should be contained within your paragraph of text, but enclosed within single quotation marks. Example (see above): Davenport, 2010, p. 16.

Longer quotations should be indented as a separate paragraph and do not require quotation marks.

Unless you are quoting from material which does not have page numbers, you will always need a page number as part of your in text citation when quoting.  

Common Knowledge

Only information which is considered general knowledge, or common knowledge within your field of study, does not have to be referenced.

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Write it Right - A guide to Harvard referencing style

Tus library midwest approved guidelines, cite them right (bloomsbury), recommended library books, other useful guides.

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Approved by Academic Council in 2011,  Write it right: a guide to the Harvard (‘Author-Date’) referencing system , is the official referencing guide for the University. 

This guide, which was revised and updated in 2021, provides guidance in referencing, citation and plagiarism.

This guide is based on the Harvard Referencing Style, as outlined in Pears, R. and Shields, G. (2022)  Cite them right: the essential referencing guide . 12 th  edn. London: Macmillan.

The Library also offers training on the Harvard referencing style. Contact the Library Desk for further information.

Please note:  As there is no definitive version of the Harvard referencing style, always check with your lecturers to confirm the referencing requirements for your work. 

This includes comprehensive coverage of the Harvard Style . 

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Harvard referencing style: Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing.

• What a bibliography looks like
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Children who develop a capacity for sympathy or compassion – often through empathetic perspectival experience – understand what their aggression has done to another separate person, for whom they increasingly care. They thus come to feel guilt about their own aggression and real concern for the well-being of the other person. Empathy is not morality, but it can supply crucial ingredients of morality. As concern develops, it leads to an increasing wish to control one’s own aggression; children recognize that other people are not their slaves but separate beings with the right to lives of their own. (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 37)

Nussbaum, M.C. (2010)  Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Harvard style]

The text in italics above has been written by Martha Nussbaum. I want to paraphrase it so I can use it in my own work. Here are some examples, showing the stages or drafts. 

Stage or draft 1

Children who develop a capacity for sympathy or compassion – understand what their aggression has done to another separate person. They feel guilty about their own aggression and real concern for the well-being of the other person. As concern develops, it leads to an increasing wish to control their own aggression. Then children recognize that other people are separate beings with the right to lives of their own, and not to be ordered around . (Nussbaum, 2010)

This example of a paraphrase shows what happens when you cut and paste text, i.e. you tend to just change words. If you compare it to the original text, you can see it is not that much different. This is a poor paraphrase, and would be likely to be regarded as plagiarism, if submitted to a plagiarism detecting service. 

Stage or draft 2

Nussbaum (2010, p. 37) considered that children need to ‘develop a capacity for sympathy or compassion’, sometimes through experiencing common events or feelings. When they do this, they can better appreciate what their actions have done to another person, for whom they may feel more affection. In fact, children may feel guilty and this helps them to change their behavior and views about other people, who they see more as individuals, to whom they need to relate, rather than issue peremptory orders to people, without reference to the other person’s feelings. 

In this example of paraphrasing, there is more evidence of thinking about the original text (rather than just cutting and pasting) and a good attempt has been made to put it into different words. The same order of the original text remains, and a good tip is to quote a memorable phrase, i.e. a section you might find difficult to put into other words. 

Stage or draft 3

Nussbaum (2010) concluded that children begin to see other people as separate living entities, with their own emotions and activity, rather than simply beings that only exist in relation to children. This process of emotional development and change may occur through experiencing similar events to another person and guilt, when reflecting on their initial, selfish reactions. 

In this example, not only has paraphrasing happened, but the original text has been summarized too, which results in less words being used. Note that the order of the original text has been changed, so that a conclusion has been made, followed by a justification or reason.

For all paraphrasing, the original source needs to be cited in the text, and the source included in the bibliography of your work. 

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A publication of the harvard college writing program.

Harvard Guide to Using Sources 

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In APA style, you use parenthetical citations within the text of your paper to credit your sources, to show how recently your sources were published, and to refer your reader to a more detailed citation of the source in the reference list at the end of your paper. You should use parenthetical citations when you paraphrase, quote, or make any reference to another author's work. A parenthetical citation in APA style includes the author's last name as well as the year in which the work was published, with a comma between them. If you are referring directly to a specific page in the source, you should also include the page number in your parenthetical citation. APA requires you to cite page numbers when you are quoting directly from the source. If you are paraphrasing, which is more common in the social sciences, you generally do not need to include a page number. If you have questions about whether you should include page numbers when citing in APA, you should consult your instructor.

If you mention the author's name and/or the year of publication in the sentence preceding the citation, you do not need to include them in the parenthetical citation. When you name the author in the sentence, you should include the publication year in parentheses right after the author’s name—do not wait until the end of the sentence to provide that information.

When you include a parenthetical citation at the end of a sentence, the punctuation for your sentence appears after the citation.

Citing author and date in a parenthetical citation

When you don’t mention either the author or the date of publication in your sentence, you should include both the author and the year, separated by a comma, in the parenthetical citation. 

Colleges and universities need to create policies that foster inclusion for low-income students (Jack, 2019).         

Citing when author’s name is mentioned in body of paper

When you mention the author’s name in your sentence, the year of publication should immediately follow the author’s name.

Anthony Jack’s (2019) study of low-income students on an elite college campus revealed that these schools are often unprepared to support the students they admit.

Jack (2019) studied the ways low-income students experience elite college campuses.

Citing page numbers

When you cite a direct quote from the source or paraphrase a specific point from the source, you should include the page number in the parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence. When you refer to a specific page or pages of the text, first list the year of publication and then list "p." followed by the page number or "pp." followed by the range of pages. If you refer to a specific chapter, indicate that chapter after the year.              

The author contends that “higher education in America is highly unequal and disturbingly stratified” (Jack, 2019, p. 4).

Jack (2019) contends that “higher education in America is highly unequal and disturbingly stratified” (p. 4).

Citing sources with more than one author

When you cite a source that has two authors, you should separate their names with an ampersand in the parenthetical citation.

The authors designed a study to determine if social belonging can be encouraged among college students (Walton & Cohen, 2011). 

If a work has three or more authors , you should only include the first author's name followed by et al. ( Et al. is the shortened form of the Latin et alia , which means “and others.”)

The implementation of postpartum contraceptive programs is both costly and time consuming (Ling et al., 2020).

Attributing a point to more than one source  

To attribute a point or idea to multiple sources, list them in one parenthetical citation, ordered alphabetically by author and separated by semicolons. Works by the same author should be ordered chronologically, from oldest to most recent, with the publication dates separated by commas.

Students who possess cultural capital, measured by proxies like involvement in literature, art, and classical music, tend to perform better in school (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Dumais, 2002; Orr, 2003).

Citing multiple works by the same author 

If your reference list includes multiple works by the same author in the same year, identify them in your parenthetical citations and in your reference list by a lowercase letter after the year, assigning each letter in alphabetical order by the title of the work. When establishing the alphabetical order of works in your reference list, do not count the words "A" or "The" when they appear as the first word in a title.

One union-endorsed candidate publicly disagreed with the teachers' union on a number of issues (Borsuk, 1999a).

Citing multiple authors with the same last name        

If your reference list includes sources by multiple authors with the same last name, list each author's initials before their last name, even when the works were published in different years.

The question of whether a computer can be considered an author has been asked for longer than we might expect (B. Sobel, 2017).

Citing when no author is listed           

To refer to a work that is listed in your reference list by title rather than by author, cite the title or the first few words of the title.

The New York Times painted a bleak picture of the climate crisis (“Climate Change Is Not Negotiable,” 2022).

Citing when no date is listed

If the work you are citing has no date listed, you should put “n.d.” for “no date” in the parenthetical citation.

Writing research papers is challenging (Lam, n.d.). 

Citing a specific part of a source that is not a page number

To refer to a specific part of a source other than page number, add that after the author-date part of your citation. If it is not clear whether you are referring to a chapter, a paragraph, a time stamp, or a slide number, or other labeled part of a source, you should indicate the part you are referring to (chapter, para., etc.).

In the Stranger Things official trailer, the audience knows that something unusual is going to happen from the moment the boys get on their bicycles to ride off into the night (Duffer & Duffer, 0:16).

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Free Harvard Referencing Generator

Generate accurate Harvard reference lists quickly and for FREE, with MyBib!

🤔 What is a Harvard Referencing Generator?

A Harvard Referencing Generator is a tool that automatically generates formatted academic references in the Harvard style.

It takes in relevant details about a source -- usually critical information like author names, article titles, publish dates, and URLs -- and adds the correct punctuation and formatting required by the Harvard referencing style.

The generated references can be copied into a reference list or bibliography, and then collectively appended to the end of an academic assignment. This is the standard way to give credit to sources used in the main body of an assignment.

👩‍🎓 Who uses a Harvard Referencing Generator?

Harvard is the main referencing style at colleges and universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. It is also very popular in other English-speaking countries such as South Africa, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. University-level students in these countries are most likely to use a Harvard generator to aid them with their undergraduate assignments (and often post-graduate too).

🙌 Why should I use a Harvard Referencing Generator?

A Harvard Referencing Generator solves two problems:

• It provides a way to organise and keep track of the sources referenced in the content of an academic paper.
• It ensures that references are formatted correctly -- inline with the Harvard referencing style -- and it does so considerably faster than writing them out manually.

A well-formatted and broad bibliography can account for up to 20% of the total grade for an undergraduate-level project, and using a generator tool can contribute significantly towards earning them.

⚙️ How do I use MyBib's Harvard Referencing Generator?

Here's how to use our reference generator:

• If citing a book, website, journal, or video: enter the URL or title into the search bar at the top of the page and press the search button.
• Choose the most relevant results from the list of search results.
• Our generator will automatically locate the source details and format them in the correct Harvard format. You can make further changes if required.
• Then either copy the formatted reference directly into your reference list by clicking the 'copy' button, or save it to your MyBib account for later.

MyBib supports the following for Harvard style:

🍏 What other versions of Harvard referencing exist?

There isn't "one true way" to do Harvard referencing, and many universities have their own slightly different guidelines for the style. Our generator can adapt to handle the following list of different Harvard styles:

• Cite Them Right
• Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)
• University of the West of England (UWE)

Daniel is a qualified librarian, former teacher, and citation expert. He has been contributing to MyBib since 2018.

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Home / Guides / Citation Guides / Harvard Referencing / Harvard Referencing Style Examples / Referencing direct quotes in Harvard style

Referencing direct quotes in Harvard style

If you include a direct quote in your paper, you’ll need to know how to create Harvard in-text citations . The Harvard style of referencing follows an author-date format for in-text citations; this means that the surname of the author and the date of publication are used to cite a quotation or idea borrowed from another author. If you include a direct quote in your paper and that source has page numbers, you’ll also need to know how to format page numbers in Harvard style .

Follow these rules when directly quoting from a source in Harvard style:

Short direct quotations

A short direct quote is one to two lines long. When you are using a short direct quotation from a source, it should be enclosed in quotation marks. The following format is used:

“Quotation” (Surname of the author, year of publication of the source, page number if applicable).

Example :  

“He put up his book of notes in a very deliberate manner” (Gaskell, 1855, p. 290).  

Note that if you mention the name of the author in the sentence containing the direct quotation, you do not have to put the author’s name in the parenthetical in-text citation.

Gaskell (1855, p. 292) writes, “She had sunk under her burden.”

While referencing this quotation in the reference list, you will follow the following format:

Surname of the author, initial(s). (Year of publication) Title of the source . Place of publication: Publisher.

Gaskell, E. (1855) North and south . London: Vintage Publishing.

Longer direct quotations

Quotations that run for more than two lines should be separated from the paragraph. A free line should be left above and below the quotation.

A colon is placed before the quotation. Unlike short quotations, longer quotations are not enclosed in quotation marks. The author’s name, date of publication, and page number are included.

The font size of the quotation should be at least 2 points smaller than the font size of the rest of the text.

The full citation in the reference list should be formatted the same way as for shorter direct quotations.

The narrator describes why Radley house was different from the otherwise amiable neighborhood of Maycomb county. As stated by Lee (1960, p. 9):

The Radleys, welcome anywhere in town, kept to themselves, a predilection unforgivable in Maycomb. They did not go to church, Maycomb’s principal recreation, but worshiped at home; Mrs. Radley seldom if ever crossed the street for a mid-morning coffee break with her neighbors, and certainly never joined a missionary circle.

This clearly shows why the Radleys were different.

Published October 29, 2020.

Harvard Formatting Guide

Harvard Formatting

• et al Usage
• Direct Quotes
• In-text Citations
• Multiple Authors
• Page Numbers
• Writing an Outline
• View Harvard Guide

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Peer Reviewed

US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election

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Taiwan has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes while it also encounters the largest amount of foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Because of the large influx of misinformation, Taiwan has taken a public crowdsourcing approach to combatting misinformation, using both fact-checking ChatBots and public dataset called CoFacts. Combining CoFacts with large-language models (LLM), we investigated misinformation across three platforms (Line, PTT, and Facebook) during the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. We found that most misinformation appears within China-friendly political groups and attacks US-Taiwan relations through visual media like images and videos. A considerable proportion of misinformation does not question U.S. foreign policy directly. Rather, it exaggerates domestic issues in the United States to create a sense of declining U.S. state capacity. Curiously, we found misinformation rhetoric that references conspiracy groups in the West.

Program in Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College, USA

Department of Political Science, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA

Department of Computer Science, Barnard College, USA

Research Questions

• What are the misinformation narratives surrounding the election in Taiwan and how do they target international relations with the United States?
• What geographical or temporal patterns emerge from misinformation data?
• Who are the targets of these misinformation narratives and through what modalities?

Essay Summary

• We leveraged a dataset of 41,291 labeled articles from Line, 911,510 posts from Facebook, and 2,005,972 posts and comments from PTT to understand misinformation dynamics through topic modeling and network analysis.
• The primary form of misinformation is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.
• Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.
• Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share many themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.
• Our study shows the prevalence of misinformation strategies using visual media and fake news websites. It also highlights how crowdsourcing and advances in large-language models can be used to identify misinformation in cross-platform workflows.

Implications

According to Freedom House, Taiwan has one of the highest indices for free speech in Asia (Freedom House, 2022). Additionally, due to its contentious history with China, it receives significant foreign interference and misinformation, especially during its presidential elections. Due to the large influx of dis- and misinformation, Taiwan has developed many strategies to counter misleading narratives, including fact-checking ChatBots on its most popular chatroom app (Chang et al., 2020). Under this information environment, the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election emerged as one of the most divisive elections in Taiwan’s history, featuring at one point a doubling of presidential candidates in a typically two-party race, from two to four. As such, Taiwan is regarded as a “canary for disinformation” against elections in 2024, as a first indicator to how foreign interference may take place in other democracies (Welch, 2024).

In this paper, we study the misinformation ecosystem in Taiwan starting a year prior to the election. First, our findings highlight the interaction between misinformation and international relations. As was reported in The Economist and The New York Times , a considerable portion of the misinformation spread in Taiwan before the 2024 election is about US-skepticism, which aims at undermining the reputation of the United States among Taiwanese people (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023; Hsu, Chien, and Myers, 2023). This phenomenon is significant because it does not target specific candidates or parties in the election but may indirectly influence the vote choice between pro- and anti-U.S. parties. Given the US-China global competition and the Russia-Ukraine ongoing conflict, the reputation of the United States is crucial for the strength and reliability of democratic allies (Cohen, 2003). Hence, it is not surprising that misinformation about the United States may propagate globally and influence elections across democracies. However, our findings surprisingly show that US-skepticism also includes a considerable number of attacks on U.S. domestic politics. Such content does not question the U.S. foreign policy but undermines the perceived reliability and state capacity of the United States. Here, s tate capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal, which is conceptually different from motivation and trust.

US-skepticism is commonly characterized as mistrusting the motivations of the United States, as illustrated in the Latin American context due to long histories of political influence (see dependency theory; Galeano, 1997), but our findings suggest that perceived U.S. state capacity is also an important narrative. As most foreign disinformation arises from China, this indicates a greater trend where authoritarian countries turn to sharp power tactics to distort information and defame global competitors rather than winning hearts and minds through soft power. Sharp power refers to the ways in which authoritarian regimes project their influence abroad to pierce, penetrate, or perforate the informational environments in targeted countries (Walker, 2018). In Taiwan’s case, China may not be able to tell China’s story well, but can still influence Taiwanese voters by making them believe that the United States is declining. Our findings suggest that future work analyzing the topics and keywords of misinformation in elections outside the United States should also consider the US-skepticism as one latent category, not just the politicians and countries as is common with electoral misinformation (Tenove et al., 2018). These findings are corroborated by narratives identified by a recent report including drug issues, race relations, and urban decay (Microsoft Threat Intelligence, 2024).

Additionally, our research investigates both misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are closely related. Whereas misinformation is broadly described as “false or inaccurate information” (Jerit & Zhao, 2020), a conspiracy theory is the belief that harmful events are caused by a powerful, often secretive, group. In particular, conspiracy communities often coalesce around activities of “truth-seeking,” embodying a contrarian view toward commonly held beliefs (Enders et al., 2022; Harambam, 2020; Konkes & Lester, 2017). Our findings also provide evidence of transnational similarities between conspiracy groups in Taiwan and the United States. Whereas the domestic context has been explored (Chen et al., 2023; Jerit & Zhao, 2020), the intersection of partisanship and conspiracy groups as conduits for cross-national misinformation flow deserves further investigation.

Second, our findings reemphasize that an IP address is not a reliable criterion for attributing foreign intervention.  Previous studies on Chinese cyber armies show that they use a VPN for their activities on Twitter (now X) (Wang et al., 2020) and Facebook (Frenkel, 2023). Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is a public forum in Taiwan that by default contains the IP address of the poster. Our analysis of PTT located a group of accounts with US IP addresses that have the same activity pattern as other Taiwan-based accounts. Therefore, it is likely that these accounts use VPN to hide their geolocation. Our results provide additional evidence that this VPN strategy also appears on secondary and localized social media platforms. Our results suggest that the analysis of the originating location of misinformation should not be based entirely on IP addresses.

Third, our findings show that text is far from the only format used in the spread of misinformation. A considerable amount of misinformation identified on Facebook is spread through links (47%), videos (21%), and photos (15%). These items may echo each other’s content or even feature cross-platform flow. Proper tools are needed to extract and juxtapose content from different types of media so that researchers can have a holistic analysis of the spread and development of misinformation (Tucker et al., 2018). Such tools are urgent since mainstream social media has adopted and highly encouraged short videos—a crucial area for researchers to assess how misinformation spreads across platforms in the upcoming year of elections. This understanding is also important for fact-check agencies because they must prepare for collecting and reviewing information on various topics found in multiple media types across platforms. Crowdsourcing, data science, expert inputs, and international collaboration are all needed to deal with multi-format misinformation environments.

With prior studies showing that the aggregated fact checks (known as wisdom of the crowds) perform on par with expert ratings (see Arechar et al., 2023; Martel et al., 2023), our case study also evidences how crowdsourcing and LLM approaches can not only quickly fact-check but also summarize larger narrative trends. In Taiwan, this takes form of the CoFacts open dataset, which we use to identify misinformation narratives. CoFacts is a project initiated by g0v (pronounced “gov zero”), a civic hacktivism community in Taiwan that started in 2012. CoFacts started as a fact-checking ChatBot that circumvents the closed nature of chatroom apps, where users can forward suspicious messages or integrate the ChatBot into private rooms. These narratives are then sent to a database. Individual narratives are subsequently reviewed by more than 2,000 volunteers, including teachers, doctors, students, engineers, and retirees (Haime, 2022). As a citizen-initiated project, it is not affiliated with any government entity or party.

Crucially, these reviews provide valuable labels that are used to train AI models and fine-tune LLMs. The dataset is available open source on the popular deep-learning platform HuggingFace. Just as AI and automation can be used to spread misinformation (Chang, 2023; Chang & Ferrara, 2022; Ferrara et al., 2020; Monaco & Woolley, 2022), it can also help combat “fake news” through human-AI collaboration.

Finding 1: The primary form of misinformation  is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.

The status quo between China and Taiwan is marked by Taiwan’s self-identification as a sovereign state, which is in contrast to China’s view of Taiwan as part of its territory under the “One China” policy. As brief context, China has claimed Taiwan as its territory since 1949, but the United States has helped maintain the status quo and peace after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. After democratization in 1987, Taiwan’s politics have been dominated by a clear blue-green division. The blue camp is led by Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT hereafter), the founding party of the Republic of China (ROC, the formal name of Taiwan’s government based on its constitution) who was defeated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The green camp is led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which pursues revising the ROC Constitution and changing the country’s name to Taiwan. The political cleavage between the blue and green camps is dictated by Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC and the United States. The blue camp’s position is that the PRC and ROC are under civil war but belong to the same Chinese nation, and thus the blue camp appreciates military support from the United States while enhancing economic and cultural cooperation with the PRC. The green camp believes that the necessary conditions for Taiwan to be free and independent are to stand firmly with the United States and maintain distance from the PRC. After 2020, the two major camps’ insufficient attention to domestic and social issues caused the rise of nonpartisans and a third party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP or the white camp), which strategically avoids discussing foreign policies. In the 2024 election, the ruling DPP party (green) was reelected with 40% of votes for the third consecutive presidency (from 2016 to 2028), while KMT (blue) and TPP (white) received 33% and 26% of votes, respectively.

The U.S. “One China” policy since 1979 indicates that the United States opposes any change to the status quo unless it is solved peacefully. This has motivated the PRC to persuade Taiwanese citizens to support unification using misinformation targeted at China-friendly political groups, as the cost of unification would be greatly reduced if sufficient Taiwanese citizens opposed U.S. military intervention. This history between the United States and Taiwan serves as the foundation of US-skepticism. In the literature, US-skepticism in Taiwan is composed of two key psychological elements: trust and motivation (Wu & Lin, 2019; Wu, 2023). First, many Taiwanese no longer trust the United States after the United States switched diplomatic ties from Taiwan (ROC) to the PRC in 1979. Many blue-camp supporters doubt the commitment of the United States to send troops should China invade, per the Taiwan Relations Act (Wu & Lin, 2019). Second, Taiwanese citizens question Taiwan’s role as a proxy in a potential war with China instead of sincerely protecting democracy and human rights in Taiwan (Wu, 2023).

The CoFacts dataset contains 140,314 articles submitted by Line users, which are then fact-checked by volunteers as rumor (47%), not a rumor (21%), not an article (19%), and opinion (13%). Here, rumor is synonymous with misinformation. Using the CoFacts dataset, we trained a BERTopic model to identify 34 forms of misinformation and then ranked them by their overlap with the word “elections” in Mandarin Chinese (George & Sumathy, 2023; Nguyen et al., 2020). Table 1 shows the top nine narratives.

Many of these narratives are directly related to political parties or the democratic process. For instance, the highest-ranked topic is attacking the incumbent party (the DPP) at 18.1%, which contains 2,371 total posts. The subsequent misinformation topics focus on policy issues and specific narratives—international relations, issues of marriage and birth rate, vaccines, nuclear energy, biometrics, egg imports, and the war in Ukraine. These are known cleavage issues and overlap with the eight central concerns during the election cycle—economic prosperity, cross-strait affairs, wealth distribution, political corruption, national security, social reform/stability, and environmental protection (Achen & Wang, 2017; Achen & Wang, 2019; Chang & Fang, 2023).

We focus on the third type of misinformation, which is the relationship between Taiwan, the United States, and China. US-skepticism is not only the largest at 10,826 individual posts, but one flagged by journalists, policymakers, and politicians as one of the most crucial themes. This is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of proportion, which aims to sow distrust toward the United States (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023). In contrast, questioning the fairness of process (i.e. ballot numbers) and policy positions (i.e. gay marriage) are common during elections. However, US-skeptical misinformation diverges in that there is no explicit political candidate or party targeted. By sampling the topic articles within this category and validating using an LLM-summarizer through the ChatGPT API, we identified three specific narratives:

(a) The United States and the threat of war: Ukraine intersects frequently in this topic, with videos of direct military actions. Example: “Did you hear former USA military strategist Jack Keane say the Ukrainian war is an investment. The USA spends just $66,000,000,000 and can make Ukraine and Russia fight…  Keane then mentions Taiwan is the same, where Taiwanese citizens are an ‘investment’ for Americans to fight a cheap war. The USA is cold and calculating, without any actual intent to help Taiwan!”

(b) Economic atrophy due to fiscal actions by the United States: These narratives focus on domestic policy issues in Taiwan such as minimum wage and housing costs. Example: “The USA printed 4 trillion dollars and bought stocks everywhere in the world, including Taiwan, and caused inflation and depressed wages. Be prepared!”

(c) Vaccine supply and the United States: While some narratives focus on the efficacy of vaccines, several describe the United States intentionally limiting supply during the pandemic. Example: “Taiwanese Dr. Lin is a leading scientist at Moderna, yet sells domestically at $39 per two doses, $50 to Israel. Taiwan must bid at least $60! The United States clearly does not value Taiwan.”

These narratives reveal a new element to US-skepticism: state capacity. As previously mentioned, state capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal. The Ukraine war and vaccine supply narratives both question the United States’ motivations in foreign policies and perceived trustworthiness. Meanwhile, the economic atrophy narrative is based on the United States’ domestic budgetary deficit and downstream impact on Taiwanese economy. These narratives frame U.S. state capacity as declining and imply that the United States could no longer realize any other commitment due to its lack of resources and capacity. The goal of such a narrative is to lower the Taiwanese audience’s belief that the United States will help. But such a narrative does not include keywords of its target group (e.g., Taiwan) nor the PCR’s goal (e.g., unification) and only works through framing and priming as an example of sharp power. 

The specific focus of misinformation narratives related to the United States is composed of Ukraine (28.8%), the economy and fiscal policies (33.1%), technology (25.2%), and vaccine supply (9.9%). Misinformation related to state capacity takes up approximately 52.4%, more than half of all narratives (see Figure A1, part a in the Appendix). In all narratives, political parties are only referenced 27.8% of the time with the DPP the primary target (26.2%), which is almost half of the proportion for state capacity. China is only mentioned in tandem with the United States in 38.4% of the posts (see Figure A1, part b in the Appendix).

Finding 2: Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.

Once we identified the top misinformation narratives using Line, we investigated information operations or coordination. Line is one of Taiwan’s most popular communication apps featuring chatrooms (similar to WhatsApp), with 83% usage. One limitation of Line is that although we can analyze message content, Line chatrooms can be seen as conversations behind “closed doors”—platforms cannot impose content moderation and researchers have no access to the users themselves nor to the private chatroom in which users engage with misinformation (Chang et al., 2020). PTT, on the other hand, provides a public forum-like environment in which users can interact. Figure 1 shows the co-occurrence network of users who post comments under the same forum. Each circle (node) represents a user who posts on PTT. If two users make mutual comments on more than 200 posts, then they are connected (form a tie). Intuitively, this means if two users are connected or “close” to each other by mutual connections, then they are likely coordinating or have extremely similar behaviors. The placement of the users reflects this and is determined by their connections.

Using the Louvain algorithm (Traag, 2015), a common method to identify communities on social networks, five communities emerged from our dataset. Each community is colored separately, with clear clusters, except for teal which is more integrated. In particular, the yellow cluster is significantly separate from the others. This means they share significant activity amongst their own community, but less so with other communities. This suggests premeditated coordination rather than organic discussion, as the users would have to target the same post with high frequency. Prior studies have shown analyzing temporal patterns can provide insight into information operations. Specifically, overseas content farms often follow a regular cadence, posting content before peak hours in Taiwan on Twitter (Wang et al., 2020) and YouTube (Hsu & Lin, 2023).

To better understand the temporal dynamics on PTT, we plotted the distribution of posts and comments over a 24-hour period. Specifically, we focused on the top two countries by volume—Taiwan and the United States. Figure 2, part a shows the time of posting. Taiwan’s activity increases from 6 in the morning until it peaks at noon (when people are on lunch break), then steadily declines into the night. In contrast, posts from the United States peak at midnight and 8 a.m. Taipei time, which corresponds to around noon and 8 p.m. in New York, respectively. This provides an organic baseline as to when we might expect people to post.

However, in Figure 2, part b, while the distribution for Taiwan (blue) remains unchanged, the peak for the United States (orange) occurs at the same time as Taiwan. One explanation is that users are responding to posts in Taiwan. The second is that users in Asia—potentially China—are using a VPN to appear as if they are in the United States. This coincides with a report by Meta Platforms that found large numbers of CCP-operated Facebook accounts and subsequently removed them (Frenkel, 2023).

The more curious issue is when considering the activity of the yellow group from Figure 1, the temporal pattern (green) shows a sharp increase in activity at 10 a.m., which then coincides with both the peaks for Taiwan (12) and the United States (22). The sudden burst of activity is consistent with prior findings on content farms from China, where posting behavior occurs when content farm workers clock in regularly for work (Wang et al., 2020). While it is difficult to prove the authenticity of these accounts, the structural and temporal aspects suggest coordination. Figure A2 in the appendix shows further evidence of coordination through the frequency distribution of counts for co-occurring posts. For the US-based group, a distribution akin to a power law appears, commonly found within social systems (Adamic & Huberman, 2000; Chang et al., 2023; Clauset et al., 2009). In contrast, the coordinated group features a significantly heavier tail, with a secondary, “unnatural,” peak at around 15 co-occurrences.

To better understand the content of these groups, Table A1 shows the summary of comments of each group and the originating post, using a large-language model for abstractive summarization (see Methods). We report the top points for comments and posts in Table A1. The coordinated community focuses on businessman Terry Gou, who considered running as a blue-leaning independent. The comments attack the incumbent DPP and their stance toward foreign policy. One popular post features President Tsai’s controversial meeting with Kevin McCarthy, then the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. When a journalist asked McCarthy if he would “invite President Tsai to Congress… or… Washington,” McCarthy replied, “I don’t have any invitation out there right now. Today we were able to meet her as she transits through America, I thought that was very productive.” While this was positively framed, the title of the post itself was translated as “McCarthy will not invite Tsai to the United States” (Doomdied, 2023). This takes on a common tactic in misinformation where statements are intentionally distorted to produce negative framings of a particular candidate.

Comments from U.S. IP addresses between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. focus on the potential alliance between the KMT and TPP. These posts are KMT-leaning with criticism toward both Lai and Ko, who are two oppositional candidates to the KMT. Some users argue that while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a negative force, the United States is not automatically a positive force, as the United States does not explicitly support Taiwan’s international recognition or economic integration. In general, both posts and comments express that Taiwan should not rely too heavily on either China or the United States. This echoes the element of trust in the US-skepticism from the historical experience between ROC and the United States.

Both the U.S.-based and coordinated groups appear as blue-leaning audiences. What differentiates the first and second case is clear evidence of misinformation in the former through inaccurate framing. While US-skepticism may be a valid political stance, if the ambient information environment contains inaccurate information, then the democratic deliberative process is at risk. The case of US-skepticism is also one where stance and truth-value are often conflated, which may influence the process of voter deliberation.

Finding 3: Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.

Lastly, we considered the groups in which misinformation is common and the way misinformation is delivered. To do so, we queried CrowdTangle using the titles and links from the CoFacts dataset specific to US-Taiwan relations. This yielded 4,632 posts from public groups. Table 2 shows the groups ranked by the total number of misinformation articles identified.

There are two themes to these groups. First, they are often pan-Blue media outlets ( CTI News ), politician support groups ( Wang Yo-Zeng Support Group ), and ROC national identity groups ( I’m an ROC Fan ). The second type is somewhat unexpected but extremely interesting; it consists of groups that espouse freedom of speech ( Support CTI News and Free Speech ) and truth-seeking ( Truth Engineering Taiwan Graduate School ), topics often regarded as conspiracies. These topics are reminiscent of those in the West, such as the rhetoric around “fake news” and “truthers,” and paint a transnational picture of how misinformation coalesces. The second largest group is Trump for the World , which supports a politician known to court conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon. These groups also serve as the “capacity” element of US-skepticism, implying that the United States is in trouble for its domestic issues and is not a reliable partner to Taiwan. Furthermore, these groups have sizable followings—ranging from 8,279 to 43,481. We show the mean, as the total number of members fluctuated over our one-year period.

Lastly, we found that the majority of misinformation contains some form of multimedia, such as video (36%) or photos (15%), as shown in Figure 3, part a. Only 1% is a direct status. This may be due to CrowdTangle not surfacing results from normal users, but the ratio of multimedia to text is quite high. This aligns with extant studies showing the growth of multimodal misinformation (Micallef et al., 2022) and also user behavior in algorithm optimization (Chang et al., 2022; Dhanesh et al., 2022; Pulley, 2020)—posts with multimedia tend to do better than posts with only text.

Moreover, 47% contain a URL. Figure 3, part b shows one of the top domains containing misinformation (beyondnews852.com) after filtering out common domains such as YouTube. The site is named “Beyond News Net” and is visually formatted like a legitimate news site to increase the perceived credibility of information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007; Wölker & Powell, 2021). The ability to rapidly generate legitimate-looking news sites as a tactic for misinformation may become a challenge for both media literacy and technical approaches to fight misinformation.

We utilized three unique misinformation datasets—Line, Facebook, and PTT—with dates between 01/12/2023 and 11/10/2023. The CoFacts dataset includes 140,193 received messages, 96,432 that have been labeled as misinformation, facts, opinion, or not relevant. Of this, 41,564 entries are misinformation. The CoFacts dataset is not only methodologically useful but exemplifies a crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking misinformation as an actual platform intervention. Moreover, it is public and transparent, allowing for replicability. Using a subset of articles and posts containing misinformation, we trained a topic model using BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022). On a high level, using BERTopic involves five steps: 1) extract embeddings using a sentence transformer, 2) reduce dimensionality, 3) cluster reduced embeddings, 4) tokenize topics, and 5) create topic representation.

We conducted several trials, experimenting with parameters such as different sentence transformer models and minimum cluster sizes for the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm. The model used to extract topics for this paper utilized paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 for our sentence embedding model (Reimers & Gurevych, 2019), had a minimum cluster size of 80 for the clustering algorithm, and used tokenize_zh for our tokenizer. Our model yielded 34 topics. We also trained a model based on latent-Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), but found the BERTopic results to be more interpretable. We then labeled all messages to indicate whether they included reference to the election or not, and ranked the topics by their election-related percentage to measure electoral salience. For our subsequent analysis, we focused on topic 3 (see Table 1), which captures general discourse about the relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan.

The Facebook dataset was extracted using CrowdTangle. We queried posts containing links and headlines from topic 3. We also cross-sectioned these links and headlines with a general election-based dataset with 911,510 posts. This yielded a total of 4,632 of posts shared on public Facebook groups and 227,125 engagements. Due to privacy concerns, it is not possible to obtain private posts from users on their own Facebook timelines, private groups, or messages. However, public groups are a good proxy for general discourse, in addition to providing ethnic or partisan affiliations via their group name (Chang & Fang, 2023). In other words, while CoFacts provides the misinformation narratives, Facebook public groups give insight into the targets of misinformation.

Lastly, we scraped PTT using Selenium. Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is unique in that it contains the IP address of the poster, though this could be shrouded by proxy farms or VPNs. First, we scraped all posts that contained reference to the United States and the election, which yielded 22,576 posts and 1,983,396 comments, all with IP addresses, addresses provided by PTT, and the time of posting. We expanded the scope of this analysis as we were interested in the general discourse directly related to the United States, and the geospatial and temporal patterns that arose. 

Due to the large amount of data, there are three general approaches we could have taken—local extractive summarization with LLMs, local abstractive summarization with LLMs, and server-based abstractive summarization (such as ChatGPT). Local extractive summarization is a method that embeds each of the input sentences and then outputs five of the most representative sentences. However, this approach is often too coarse, as it returns sentences with the highest centrality but does not summarize general themes across all the different comments or posts. On the other hand, abstractive summarization works by considering the entire context by ingesting many documents and then summarizing across them. This provides a more generalized characterization of key themes. However, the input size is the primary bottleneck as large-language models can only ingest so many tokens (or words), which also need to be held in memory—the case for our project, as we are summarizing more than 10,000 posts.

To circumvent these issues, we sampled the maximum number of posts or comments that could fit within 16,000 tokens and then made a query call using the ChatGPT API. This provided a summary based on a probabilistic sample of the posts and comments.

• / Elections

Cite this Essay

Chang, H. C. H., Wang, A. H. E., & Fang Y. S. (2024). US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-144

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No funding has been received to conduct this research.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

No human subjects were included in this study.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All materials needed to replicate this study are available via the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5SPGDY . The Cofacts database is available on HuggingFace and Facebook via CrowdTangle per regulation of Meta Platforms.

Acknowledgements

H. C. would like to thank Brendan Nyhan, Sharanya Majumder, John Carey, and Adrian Rauschfleish for their comments. H.C. would like to thank the Dartmouth Burke Research Initiation Award.

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• Introduction

Reference examples

Missing information, citation examples, tools and resources, how to reference in harvard style.

Harvard referencing is a widely used referencing style (especially in UK universities) that includes author-date in-text citations and a complete reference list at the end of the text.

There are many versions of Harvard referencing style. Our guidance reflects the rules laid out in Cite Them Right: The Essential Referencing Guide (12th edition) by Richard Pears and Graham Shields.

Scribbr’s free reference generator can create flawless Harvard style references for a wide variety of sources.

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Harvard reference entries

The reference list appears at the end of your text, listing full information on all the sources you cited. A Harvard reference entry generally mentions the author , date , title , publisher or publication that contains the source, and URL or DOI if relevant.

You’ll include different details depending on the type of source you’re referencing, as some information is only relevant to certain kinds of publications.

The format of a reference entry varies based on source type. Apart from the information included, formatting details such as the use of italics also depend on what you’re referencing. The tabs below show formats and examples for the most commonly referenced source types.

The suggested information won’t necessarily all be available for the source you’re referencing. To learn how to work around missing information in your references, check the table below.

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Harvard in-text citations

Harvard referencing style uses author-date in-text citations, which means including the author’s last name and the publication year of the source, like this: (Smith, 2019). This citation points the reader to the corresponding entry in the reference list.

Always include an in-text citation when you quote or paraphrase a source. Include a page number or range when available and relevant to indicate which part of the source you’re drawing on. Using material from other sources without acknowledging them is plagiarism.

In-text citations can be parenthetical (author and date both in parentheses) or narrative (author name mentioned in the sentence, date in parentheses). A source may also have more than one author. If there are four or more, name only the first, followed by “ et al. ”

As with reference entries, it’s good to be aware of how to deal with missing information in your in-text citations.

Scribbr offers a variety of other tools and resources to help with referencing and other aspects of academic writing:

• Referencing generator : Scribbr’s free referencing generator can also create flawless citations in other styles, such as APA and MLA .
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