APA 7th edition
How to cite a thesis or dissertation in APA 7th edition
A thesis needs its degree level and awarding institution, and the format changes depending on whether you read it in a repository or as an unpublished manuscript.
THE FORMAT
A thesis or dissertation in APA, at a glance
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the thesis [Doctoral dissertation, Name of Institution]. Repository Name. https://example.org/record
Delgado, M. P. (2021). Feedback literacy in first-year engineering writing [Doctoral dissertation, Northfield State University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2534891077
(Delgado, 2021)
In prose: Delgado (2021) followed 62 first-year students through a full year of feedback cycles.
Delgado, M. P. (2021). Feedback literacy in first-year engineering writing [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Northfield State University.
In text: (Delgado, 2021)
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the references builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What APA needs from a thesis or dissertation
Elements to collect
- Author
- Year the degree was awarded
- Title of the thesis
- Degree level — doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis
- Name of the awarding institution
- Repository or database name, plus URL, when it is published online
Rules specific to this entry
- The awarding institution goes inside the square brackets with the degree level, separated by a comma. It is not the publisher, so it never moves to the end of the entry.
- The bracketed description is plain text immediately after the italicized title, with no period between them: <em>Title</em> [Doctoral dissertation, University].
- The repository or database takes the publisher slot. This is one of the few places APA still names a database, because the repository is how the work was published.
- Use “master’s thesis” in the brackets for a master’s degree, in lowercase, and keep the year of the award rather than the year of deposit if the two differ.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element APA needs for a thesis or dissertation: Author; Year the degree was awarded; Title of the thesis; Degree level — doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the APA order: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the thesis [Doctoral dissertation, Name of Institution]. Repository Name. https://example.org/record
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Delgado, 2021) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Delgado (2021) followed 62 first-year students through a full year of feedback cycles..
Check it against the exceptions
The awarding institution goes inside the square brackets with the degree level, separated by a comma. It is not the publisher, so it never moves to the end of the entry.
APA RULES
The conventions behind every APA entry
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the references is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the references is sorted, and where APA entries most often go wrong — are collected on the APA 7th edition guide.
The same thesis or dissertation in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about APA and theses and dissertations
What if the thesis or dissertation has no author?
Move the title into the author position and alphabetize by the first significant word of that title — ignoring an initial “A”, “An” or “The”. In the text, use a shortened form of the title where the author name would go.
What do I need before I can cite a thesis or dissertation?
Author, Year the degree was awarded, Title of the thesis, and the rest of the elements listed above. A thesis needs its degree level and awarding institution, and the format changes depending on whether you read it in a repository or as an unpublished manuscript.
Is there anything unusual about a thesis or dissertation in APA?
The awarding institution goes inside the square brackets with the degree level, separated by a comma. It is not the publisher, so it never moves to the end of the entry.
What else catches people out here?
The bracketed description is plain text immediately after the italicized title, with no period between them: <em>Title</em> [Doctoral dissertation, University].
Can I reformat this thesis or dissertation in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole references at once.
