Harvard Style Citation and Bibliography

Question

I am new to LaTeX and I am having problems with my bibliography.

What I want : I am writing my thesis and I want to have Harvard style citation and bibliography. (http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm)

Attempt 1 : documentclass is 'report'. In my main document, I added

\begin{thebibliography}{99}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Bibliography}

\bibitem{Knuth92} D.E. Knuth, \emph{Two notes on notation}, Amer.
Math. Monthly \textbf{99} (1992), 403--422.

\end{thebibliography}

and

\cite{Knuth92}

I could write the bibitem anyway I want and it comes out as I wrote it. But the citation is [#ID#] and not (Author, Year). Also, it is tedious to write up all the bibliography entries according to the type of the source because I am expecting nearly 75+ sources.

Attempt 2 : I searched the inet, and created a modular document - a separate bib file with

@conference{citekeyconference,
author = "First Name, Second Name and Third Name",
title = "Title",
booktitle = "Title of book",
year = "YYYY",

editor = "Editor",
volume/number = "Volume 1",
number = "Number 1",
series = "Series 1",
pages = "Pages 1 - 10",
address = "Address",
month = "Month",
publisher = "Publisher",
organization = "Organisation",
note = "Additional note",
}

and no preamble in the .bib file.

And, used natbib like

\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{agsm}
\begin{document}
...
\bibliography{<your-bib-file>}
\end{document}

no sucess (not getting the output like the way I wanted it tobe.

So, used bibtex like

\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{<your-bib-file.bib>} % note the .bib is required
\begin{document}
...
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Compiled for more than ten times successively as I read in the Wikibook, but still get some errors.

error for biblatex

package biblatex error : file Report.bbl not created by biblatex \begin{document}

error for natbib

package natbib error : bibliography not compatiable with author year citations ....

MY QUERY : Can you please help me get it right?

Answer 1

In this example I used \parencite{key} to put some parenthesis around the in text citation.

mythesis.tex

\documentclass[bibtotocnumbered]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage[style=authoryear,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{library.bib}

\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\newpage

Some text to cite here \parencite[23]{Lin1973}. 
Another text to cite here \parencite[123]{Goedel1930}.

\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc]
\end{document}

library.bib

% This file was created with JabRef 2.9.2.
% Encoding: UTF8    

@BOOK{Goedel1930,
  title = {Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls},
  publisher = {Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik},
  year = {1930},
  author = {Kurt Gödel},
  address = {Wien}
}    

@ARTICLE{Lin1973,
  author = {Shen Lin and Brian W. Kernighan},
  title = {An Effective Heuristic Algorithm for the Travelling-Salesman Problem},
  journal = {Operations Research},
  year = {1973},
  volume = {21},
  pages = {498--516}
}

My Workflow:

pdflatex mythesis
biber mythesis
pdflatex mythesis
pdflatex mythesis

To edit your .bib file I would recommend you a reference manager like JabRef.

Make sure your files are encoded in UTF8.