Examples of Thesis Citations in APA

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Suppose you are that student who is looking to find a way of citing his dissertation or thesis. Then the writing help that you need in this case is not far away. In this article, we will give some tips that will help you to come with excellent citations. In this essay, you will get to know how to cite undergraduate theses, doctoral, and master theses. We will also compare a thesis and dissertations that the writers will publish and the ones that they will not publish. 

What do you need?

For starters, let us look at the different kinds of literature:

  • Masters’ thesis
  • Undergraduate thesis
  • Doctoral thesis

You will have to know the differences. When citing, you also have to know the kind of thesis you are citing. Make sure you know if the writers have published their work or they have not. And what you have to keep in mind is that, if you have decided to cite your work. You must keep in mind the following. This information is very crucial in your citations:

  1. The name of the author (last name, 1st initials, and middle name initials)
  2. Year published
  3. Title of the dissertation and thesis.
  4. Find out if the author has published their work
  5. Document number or publication number
  6. Type of the degree (masters, doctoral, undergraduate)
  7. Dissertation or thesis
  8. The institution that awarded the degree

Now because the dissertation and thesis are directly connected to the degrees of education, it is essential to include the university’s name, a college that gave the student that degree. To understand this properly, let us have some examples below. 

  • Dissertation and unpublished thesis.
  • A dissertation that is from the database and published thesis
  • A dissertation that the author publishes online and the thesis

Dissertation and unpublished thesis

Now because the thesis is not published, you can get them from the university library. The structure that you can use here includes the name of the university and the publisher’s elements.

Structure: The author’s last name, First name, Middle name (the year they published it) writes the titles in the form of sentence case [unpublished thesis and dissertation], then the institution’s name.

Example: Jon, G.A (1996). The impacts of global warming in the world today. (unpublished thesis) Kampala international university.

A dissertation that is from the database and published thesis

If you have got a dissertation or thesis that they published and it is also present in the database. Then you must follow the structure below. It is almost similar to the previous examples. But slightly different. The differences are the school’s name is out in brackets, and it comes after the title. You must also include the database or archive name. 

Structure: The last name of the author, First name. Middle name (the year they published the work). Title in the sentence case form (document or publication number) [type of degree, dissertation or thesis, institution’s name]. Name of the database. 

Example: Miracle, G.A (1997). The effects of global warming on agriculture today (accession no. 5472885929) [doctoral dissertation, Harvard University]. Dissertations publishing.

In the example that we have given above, we represent the document number as document no. It is also known as a publication number or database number. It is the number that the database identifies the dissertation in the database. If you have used a database that having that number, make sure you also include that number.

A dissertation that the author publishes online and the thesis

Structure: The last name of the author, first name of the author (initial). The middle name of the author (initials) (the year they published the work.) Title in the sentence case form. [Degree type, thesis or dissertation, name in the institution] name of collection or archive. URL

Conclusion

Now when you are trying to cite work, make sure you know the kind of work you are citing.