Citation styles: APA, IEEE and Harvard

Start with what your university says

Before choosing any style, open your PhD regulations and read the part on thesis format. Some universities fix one style. Some give a choice between a few styles. Some others leave it to the guide and the committee. In the universities of our five cities we have seen all these three types.

• CHRIST in Bengaluru wants IEEE for science and engineering. For law, management, commerce, the humanities and the social sciences, they want the latest APA.
• Anna University follows an author-year style like “Jones (2001)”, with an alphabetical list. Your own published papers are not put in the reference list. They go in a separate list.
• Osmania University rules for 2026-27 ask you to use one standard style. The choices given are APA 7, IEEE, Harvard or Oxford.
• KTU asks for a standard journal style of your field, followed the same way throughout. The rules give IEEE in Electrical Engineering as one example.
• SCTIMST in Thiruvananthapuram uses SAGE-Harvard. Their guidelines also want the reference count kept near 200.
• Health-science theses at Tamil Nadu’s Dr. M.G.R. Medical University follow Vancouver style.
• The University of Madras leaves the presentation style for the supervisor and the Research Advisory Committee to decide.

If your rules name a style, there is nothing for you to decide. Just follow it. If the choice is left to your committee, get the style agreed in a review meeting and have it written in the minutes. Write the edition also, for example APA 7th edition.

APA, the author-date style most social scientists use

APA is from the American Psychological Association. The seventh edition is the current one. Inside the text you write the author’s surname and the year. When you quote the exact words, add the page number also, like (Raman & Iyer, 2021, p. 47).

A few small rules are confusing many scholars. For two authors inside the bracket, you put “&” between the names. When the names are part of your sentence you write “and”, as in Raman and Iyer (2021) found that… For three or more authors, APA 7 uses “et al.” from the first citation itself. In the sixth edition it was not like that. So if you are following a senior’s thesis, it may be showing the old pattern.

The reference list goes in alphabetical order of surname, with a hanging indent. For a journal article you give the authors, year, article title, journal name, volume, issue, pages and the DOI. The article title is in sentence case. Journal name and volume are in italics. DOI is written as a link, like https://doi.org/…. Journal titles keep their capital letters, but article titles do not. We find this one detail wrong in very many Indian theses.

IEEE, the numbered style of engineering

IEEE uses numbers in square brackets, like [4]. You put the number in the sentence itself, before the full stop or comma comes. Whichever source you cite first gets [1]. A new source after that gets [2], then [3] for the next new one, like that. If you cite source [4] again in Chapter 5, it remains [4] only. One number always points to one reference.

Because of this the reference list is in number order, not alphabetical. As per IEEE’s own reference guide, you can list up to six author names in one reference. If the paper has more than six authors, write only the first author’s name and then “et al.”. In author names the initials come first, so write K. Raman and not Raman, K.

Every number gets its own brackets. For two sources you write [1], [5], and for a run of sources you write [1]–[3]. The forms [1, 5] and [1–3] are not IEEE’s own style, though many university templates are still showing them. If your template asks for that form, follow the template. The biggest IEEE mistake we see in theses is numbering chapter-wise, where Chapter 3 again starts from [1]. Unless your university asks for this, keep one numbering for the full thesis.

Harvard, the style with many versions

Many scholars think Harvard is one fixed style. Actually there are many author-date styles under the Harvard name, and each university and publisher keeps its own version. In some versions there is a comma after the author name and in some there is no comma. With “and” and “&” also the versions differ. Because of this, two theses can both say “Harvard” and look different, and both can still be correct.

In the text Harvard looks very close to APA, for example (Raman and Iyer 2021) or Raman and Iyer (2021, p. 47). The reference list is also alphabetical. In practice the difference from APA is mostly in punctuation and in the order of a few elements in each reference.

If you are using Harvard, mention which version you followed, for example the one in your reference manager or a named library guide. After that, don’t mix APA habits into it. SCTIMST is one example, they name SAGE-Harvard, which is one particular version. If your committee simply says “Harvard”, ask them which one they mean.

Vancouver, Chicago and the rest

Some departments use other styles also. Vancouver is a numbered style used in medicine and health sciences, and it is quite similar to IEEE. History and some humanities theses use Chicago in its notes-and-bibliography form. MLA is seen in English literature departments.

The advice is same here also. First see what your regulations say. If nothing is written there, take five theses your department uploaded to Shodhganga in the last few years and check which style was accepted. Then discuss about it with your guide and fix it.

Mistakes examiners notice at once

Mixing styles. Chapter 2 is in APA and Chapter 4 is in numbered style. Mostly it comes because chapters got written months apart. Sometimes a scholar copies text from a paper and the citations come along with it. Among comments on references, this is the one examiners give most.

Citations with no reference, and references with no citation. Whatever source you cite in the text should be there in the list. And every entry in the list should be cited somewhere in the text. A reference manager will catch this for you. When the list is typed by hand, it is mostly missed.

Year mismatches. The text says “Kumar (2018)” but the list says “Kumar (2019)”. Examiners do check a few entries like this.

Secondary citations hidden. Sometimes you read a source only inside someone else’s review. Then write it that way, like (Rao, 1998, as cited in Raman & Iyer, 2021). If you cite the original as though you read it yourself, it can become a problem in the viva-voce.

No page number given for a quote. For an exact quotation the page number is needed. It is useful later also, when you have to explain a match in your similarity report.

Let the software do the formatting

Whatever the style, typing references by hand takes long time and mistakes come easily. Use Zotero or Mendeley, select the style one time and let the software make the list. If your guide changes the style at the last stage, you only have to change one setting. For a single reference from a DOI, you can use our citation generator. It gives the entry in APA, IEEE or Harvard.

A few universities have their own local variant of a style, and none of the ready-made styles in the software will match it. In that case our thesis formatting service can set your reference list as per your university rules, using your own library. You check every entry yourself before the thesis goes for printing.