How to cite in a thesis: APA and Harvard with examples

Pick one style and never mix

Universities most often require APA or Harvard (author-date), some fields use Chicago or numbered styles like IEEE. All of them do the same two jobs: a short pointer in the text and a full record in the list. Which style you use is set by your faculty guidelines; the one unforgivable mistake is mixing styles in one thesis.

Examples: book and article (APA 7)

A reference has a fixed order of elements: the author, the year in parentheses, the title and the publisher. The in-text pointer keeps only the surname, the year and the page, so the reader knows which entry in the list to look for.

A journal article adds the host source between the author and the pages: the journal title, the volume with the issue in parentheses, and the page range. Those are the elements you fill in last, and filling them in from memory is how a reference stops matching the article you read.

Websites, Wikipedia and online sources

An online source carries elements a book does not: the publication date, the retrieval date and the URL where you actually read the document. The same logic builds the record for an AI tool such as ChatGPT, where the link and the date carry the whole reference. Whether your faculty wants a retrieval date on every web source is set by its own guidelines, so check it there.

Wikipedia is recorded this way only when your supervisor explicitly permits it; otherwise it is a route to the primary source and what you cite is the source it points at. Whether a source holds up at all is a separate question, handled in finding and checking a source. If you are allowed to cite it, use the "Permanent link" item in the page tools: it adds the revision number to the address, so the reference points at the text you read.

Paraphrase vs. direct quotation

A direct quotation is a verbatim copy in quotation marks with a page number; use it sparingly, for definitions and wording that matters. Everything else should be paraphrased: state the idea in your own words and cite the source, and paraphrasing without plagiarising is a technique in its own right, not a hunt for synonyms.

Reference list rules that get checked

What gets checked here is not style but mechanical agreement, and the five rules below take one evening, topic or no topic.

• Every source cited in the text appears in the list and vice versa (examiners and software check the pairing)
• One consistent format: every book identical, every article identical, down to the punctuation
• Alphabetical order for author-date styles, citation order for numbered styles
• Online sources always carry an access date and a working URL
• Secondary citations (Novak, as cited in Kovacs) only when the original is genuinely unavailable

The most common mistakes

These mistakes come from the order of the work, not from ignorance, and all five share one repair: cite as you write.

• Mixed styles: half the pointers (Novak, 2021), the other half [12]
• Citations added after the writing: page numbers, volumes and editions no longer match
• Wikipedia and blogs as load-bearing sources instead of academic literature
• Missing page numbers on direct quotations
• A hand-built reference list with typos in names and years

References that appear as you write, not after

The citation apparatus is exactly the kind of work worth delegating to tools: reference managers (Zotero, Mendeley) or a generator that cites as it writes. AIPráce inserts citations while generating the text, uses only verified real sources, and builds the reference list automatically in one consistent format. Your job is then just to review.