Citation Style
A standardized set of rules, such as APA or Chicago, governing how citations and reference entries are formatted and punctuated.
A citation style is a published set of conventions specifying how sources are acknowledged: what an in-text citation looks like, how reference entries are ordered and punctuated, and how elements such as authors, dates, titles, and DOIs are presented. Widely used styles include APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, and Vancouver, and many journals and universities maintain their own variants. Styles differ in visible ways, such as author-date versus numbered systems, and in fine details like capitalization and italics.
A thesis must apply one style consistently from first page to last, and inconsistency is a common item on examiner reports. Confirm the required style with your department before writing, set it in your citation manager, and let the software format entries. Manual formatting invites drift, especially when a document contains hundreds of references edited over many months.
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