15 July 2026 · 8 min read
Every university course expects a specific referencing style, and using the wrong one — or mixing two — costs marks on almost every assignment. The good news: once you understand the logic behind each style, they're mechanical. This guide covers the four you're most likely to meet.
APA is the standard in psychology, nursing, education and most social sciences. In-text citations use author and year — (Smith, 2023) — with page numbers added for direct quotes: (Smith, 2023, p. 14). The reference list is alphabetical by author surname, with the year in brackets after the author: Smith, J. (2023). Title of the book in sentence case. Publisher.
Harvard is common in business, law and UK/Australian universities generally. It looks similar to APA — (Smith 2023) or (Smith, 2023) depending on your university's variant — but reference list formatting differs, and crucially there is no single official Harvard standard. Always follow your own university's Harvard guide rather than a generic one.
MLA dominates in English literature and the humanities. In-text citations use author and page number with no year — (Smith 14) — and the source list is titled "Works Cited". Titles are in Title Case, and the emphasis is on the container system: the work, the collection it appears in, the platform it lives on.
IEEE is the standard for engineering and computer science. Citations are bracketed numbers in order of first appearance — [1], [2] — and the reference list is numerical, not alphabetical. Author names are abbreviated (J. Smith), and titles of papers sit in quotation marks while journal names are italicised.
Referencing is one of the easiest places to stop losing marks, because it's pure technique. If you want an expert check of your citations and reference list before you submit, Assignment Byte's editors can proofread your draft — message us on WhatsApp.