Best Practices For Citing Sources In Your PhD Dissertation

Writing a dissertation needs students to consider many additional things that masters and bachelor’s students do not even know. For example, in an undergraduate thesis, students are asked to only get through the research process to have hands-on experience with the standard research conducting practices. In other words, the originality of research, reliability of findings, and authenticity of the sources included in a thesis do not matter a lot, at undergraduate level. However, all these things (reliability, originality, and authenticity) are major concerns for the master’s dissertation. Concurrently, these thesis quality concerns increase many times when a doctoral dissertation is taken under observation.

In a few simple words, a doctoral dissertation must be a masterpiece depicting high-quality research as well as writing standards that must have no parallel. Thereby, to strive for originality, reliability or authenticity of sources included in a dissertation, best practices for citing sources must be exhibited. This article is all about using reference guides as best practices for citing sources in the doctoral dissertation in order to save scholars from thesis quality-related issues.

Citing sources in dissertation- A brief introduction

A citation is simply a complete reference to the published sources that a researcher consulted to collect data or pick ideas for a current study. The most obvious reason for citing information in research work is that a reference or citation makes research more credible.

The citation tells readers from where the researcher has collected data. Furthermore, to search for a source to be used as evidence, citations help introduce the researcher to other relevant work in the same field. A citation also gives credit to the original author of a work. Lastly, citations are also extremely useful in avoiding serious research misconduct such as dishonesty, data fabrication or falsification, and plagiarism. All in all, citation, on the one hand, helps researchers to prove the validity of their research, and on the other hand, it makes a complete list of all relevant sources that others may require for solving relevant queries.

There are many ways in which a researcher can cite the source for the , most frequently, professors in universities as well as experts from good dissertation help provider firms guide students on the proper way of citing sources. Mostly, this guidance is also based on one of the standard referencing style guides that tell how to cite a source in MLA, APA, Harvard, Chicago, and other methods. The following is a brief overview of how to cite a source using the APA and Harvard style so PhD scholars can easily understand how these referencing guides work:

Citing a source in APA style:

Basically, in all reference styles, the basic elements include the author (s) second name, year of publication, the title of the source, volume of the edition, name of the journal, and page number. All referencing guides include these things with a title difference in arrangement, punctuations, and writing styles. But the citation includes only the author’s second name and date of publication.

For example:  In APA style the complete reference of a source created by a software or google scholar is:

“Idris, F., Mohd Ali, & Akhther, K. A. (2008). The impacts of leadership style and best practices on company performances: Empirical evidence from business firms in Malaysia. Total Quality Management, 19(1-2), 165-173.”

Then in order to manually make it according to the APA style, you can cite the source in following way: ‘name(s) of the author(s), full stop and year of publication within bracket followed by a full stop, title followed by a full stop, italicize journal name, comma, volume or edition’s number, and page number followed by a full stop.

Thus, the rule for making the citation for the APA style is to ‘write the last name of the first three authors with symbol ‘&’ and year of publication after placing a comma within the round bracket’. Similarly, if a reference includes more than three authors, then the last name of the first author must be immediately followed by ‘et al.,’ and the year of publication, within a bracket. Additionally, if a piece of information collected from another source is in the form of a direct quote, then within the bracket alongside the authors’ last name, the page number must also be written. In summary, the citation in APA style will be:

1. In the case of only one author: (Idris, 2008)
2. In the case of two authors: (Idris & Mohd, 2008)
3. In the case of three authors: (Idris, Mohd & Akhther, 2008)
4. In the case of four authors: ( Idris et al., 2008)
5. In the case of direct quotes, the above citations will become: (Idris, 2008, p. 165-173), (Idris & Mohd, 2008, p. 165-173), (Idris, Mohd & Akhther, 2008, p. 165-173) and ( Idris et al., 2008, p. 165-173)

Similarly, the best practice for citing the same reference in Harvard style is:

“Idris, F. and Mohd Ali, K.A., 2008. The impacts of leadership style and best practices on company performances: Empirical evidence from business firms in Malaysia. Total Quality Management, 19(1-2), pp.165-173.”

The basic concept behind this is ‘name(s) of the author(s), full stop and comma (.,), year of publication followed by a full stop, title followed by a full stop, italicize journal name, comma, volume or edition number, and page number followed by a full stop. The in-text citation for this includes:

1. In the case of only one author: (Idris, 2008)
2. In the case of two authors: (Idris and Mohd, 2008)
3. In the case of three authors: (Idris et al., 2008)
4. In the case of four authors: ( Idris et al., 2008)
5. In the case of direct quotes, the above citations will become: (Idris, 2008, p. 165-173), (Idris and Mohd, 2008, p. 165-173), (Idris, Mohd and Akhther, 2008, p. 165-173) and ( Idris et al., 2008, p. 165-173)

Final Thoughts:

Citing sources is necessary in all sorts of academic writing, but the responsibility to adopt the best practice increases many times when it comes to a doctorate dissertation. Without proper references or citations, the dissertation will not be accepted; thus, the article has given a simple solution of using a proper referencing guide (APA and Harvard) for the dissertation. However, thanks to artificial intelligence, we can now use numerous citation machines, websites, and software for automatically citing sources within a fraction of time. Even though these tools are really effective, but a basic understanding of these reference guides is necessary to ensure accuracy.