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How to Cite a Thesis or Dissertation in APA

In this citation guide, you will learn how to reference and cite an undergraduate thesis, master’s thesis, or doctoral dissertation. This guide will also review the differences between a thesis or dissertation that is published and one that has remained unpublished. The guidelines below come from the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020a), pages 333 and 334. Please note that the association is not affiliated with this guide.

Alternatively, you can visit EasyBib.com for helpful citation tools to cite your thesis or dissertation .

Guide Overview

Citing an unpublished thesis or dissertation, citing a published dissertation or thesis from a database, citing a thesis or dissertation published online but not from a database, citing a thesis or dissertation: reference overview, what you need.

Since unpublished theses can usually only be sourced in print form from a university library, the correct citation structure includes the university name where the publisher element usually goes.

Author’s last name, F. M. (Year published). Title in sentence case [Unpublished degree type thesis or dissertation]. Name of institution.

Ames, J. H., & Doughty, L. H. (1911). The proposed plans for the Iowa State College athletic field including the design of a reinforced concrete grandstand and wall [Unpublished bachelor’s thesis]. Iowa State University.

In-text citation example:

• Parenthetical :  (Ames & Doughty, 1911)
• Narrative :  Ames & Doughty (1911)

If a thesis or dissertation has been published and is found on a database, then follow the structure below. It’s similar to the format for an unpublished dissertation/thesis, but with a few differences:

• The institution is presented in brackets after the title
• The archive or database name is included

Author’s last name, F. M. (Year published). Title in sentence case (Publication or Document No.) [Degree type thesis or dissertation, Name of institution]. Database name.

Examples 1:

Knight, K. A. (2011). Media epidemics: Viral structures in literature and new media (Accession No. 2013420395) [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara]. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

Trotman, J.B. (2018). New insights into the biochemistry and cell biology of RNA recapping (Document No. osu1523896565730483) [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses & Dissertations Center.

In the example given above, the dissertation is presented with a Document Number (Document No.). Sometimes called a database number or publication number, this is the identifier that is used by the database’s indexing system. If the database you are using provides you with such a number, then include it directly after the work’s title in parentheses.

If you are interested in learning more about how to handle works that were accessed via academic research databases, see Section 9.3 of the Publication Manual.

In-text citation examples :

• Parenthetical citation : (Trotman, 2018)
• Narrative citation : Trotman (2018)

Author’s last name, F. M. (Year Published). Title in sentence case [Degree type thesis or dissertation, Name of institution]. Name of archive or collection. URL

Kim, O. (2019). Soviet tableau: cinema and history under late socialism [Doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh]. Institutional Repository at the University of Pittsburgh. https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/37669/7/Olga%20Kim%20Final%20ETD.pdf

Stiles, T. W. (2001). Doing science: Teachers’ authentic experiences at the Lone Star Dinosaur Field Institute [Master’s thesis, Texas A&M University]. OAKTrust. https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2001-THESIS-S745

It is important to note that not every thesis or dissertation published online will be associated with a specific archive or collection. If the work is published on a private website, provide only the URL as the source element.

In-text citation examples:

• Parenthetical citation : (Kim, 2019)
• Narrative citation : Kim (2019)
• Parenthetical citation : (Stiles, 2001)
• Narrative citation : Stiles (2001)

We hope that the information provided here will serve as an effective guide for your research. If you’re looking for even more citation info, visit EasyBib.com for a comprehensive collection of educational materials covering multiple source types.

If you’re citing a variety of different sources, consider taking the EasyBib citation generator for a spin. It can help you cite easily and offers citation forms for several different kinds of sources.

To start things off, let’s take a look at the different types of literature that are classified under Chapter 10.6 of the Publication Manual :

• Undergraduate thesis
• Master’s thesis
• Doctoral dissertation

You will need to know which type you are citing. You’ll also need to know if it is published or unpublished .

When you decide to cite a dissertation or thesis, you’ll need to look for the following information to use in your citation:

• Author’s last name, and first and middle initials
• Year published
• Title of thesis or dissertation
• If it is unpublished
• Publication or document number (if applicable; for published work)
• Degree type (bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral)
• Thesis or dissertation
• Name of institution awarding degree
• DOI (https://doi.org/xxxxx) or URL (if applicable)

Since theses and dissertations are directly linked to educational degrees, it is necessary to list the name of the associated institution; i.e., the college, university, or school that is awarding the associated degree.

To get an idea of the proper form, take a look at the examples below. There are three outlined scenarios:

• Unpublished thesis or dissertation
• Published thesis or dissertation from a database
• Thesis or dissertation published online but not from a database

American Psychological Association. (2020a). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

American Psychological Association. (2020b). Style-Grammar-Guidelines. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/parenthetical-versus-narrative

Published August 10, 2012. Updated March 24, 2020.

Written and edited by Michele Kirschenbaum and Elise Barbeau. Michele Kirschenbaum is a school library media specialist and the in-house librarian at EasyBib.com. Elise Barbeau is the Citation Specialist at Chegg. She has worked in digital marketing, libraries, and publishing.

APA Formatting Guide

APA Formatting

• Annotated Bibliography
• Block Quotes
• et al Usage
• In-text Citations
• Multiple Authors
• Paraphrasing
• Page Numbers
• Parenthetical Citations
• Reference Page
• Sample Paper
• APA 7 Updates
• View APA Guide

Citation Examples

• Book Chapter
• Journal Article
• Magazine Article
• Newspaper Article
• Website (no author)
• View all APA Examples

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To cite a published thesis in APA style, it is important that you know some basic information such as the author, publication year, title of the thesis, institute name, archive name, and URL (uniform resource locator). The templates for an in-text citation and reference list entry of a thesis, along with examples, are given below:

In-text citation template and example:

Use the author surname and the publication year in the in-text citation.

Author Surname (Publication Year)

Cartmel (2007)

Parenthetical:

(Author Surname, Publication Year)

(Cartmel, 2007)

Reference list entry template and example:

The title of the thesis is set in sentence case and italicized. Enclose the thesis and the institute awarding the degree inside brackets following the publication year. Then add the name of the database followed by the URL.

Author Surname, F. M. (Publication Year). Title of the thesis [Master’s thesis, Institute Name]. Name of the Database. URL

Cartmel, J. (2007). Outside school hours care and schools [Master’s thesis, Queensland University of Technology]. EPrints. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/17810/1/Jennifer_Cartmel_Thesis.pdf

To cite an unpublished dissertation in APA style, it is important that you know some basic information such as the author, year, title of the dissertation, and institute name. The templates for in-text citation and reference list entry of an online thesis, along with examples, are given below:

Author Surname (Year)

Averill (2009)

(Author Surname, Year)

(Averill, 2009)

The title of the dissertation is set in sentence case and italicized. Enclose “Unpublished doctoral dissertation” inside brackets following the year. Then add the name of the institution awarding the degree.

Author Surname, F. M. (Publication Year). Title of the dissertation [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Name of the Institute.

Averill, R. (2009). Teacher–student relationships in diverse New Zealand year 10 mathematics classrooms: Teacher care [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Victoria University of Wellington.

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APA Style 7th Edition: Citing Your Sources

• Basics of APA Formatting
• In Text Quick View
• Block Quotes
• Books & eBooks
• Thesis/Dissertation

Standard Format

Formatting rules, various examples.

• Audiovisual
• Conference Presentations
• Social Media
• Legal References
• Reports and Gray Literature
• Academic Integrity and Plagiarism
• Additional Resources
• Reference Page

Adapted from American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed).  https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Formatting:

• Italicize the title
• Identify whether source is doctoral dissertation or master’s thesis in parentheses after the title

See Ch. 10 pp. 313-352 of APA Manual for more examples and formatting rules

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Reference List: Common Reference List Examples

Article (with doi).

Alvarez, E., & Tippins, S. (2019). Socialization agents that Puerto Rican college students use to make financial decisions. Journal of Social Change , 11 (1), 75–85. https://doi.org/10.5590/JOSC.2019.11.1.07

Laplante, J. P., & Nolin, C. (2014). Consultas and socially responsible investing in Guatemala: A case study examining Maya perspectives on the Indigenous right to free, prior, and informed consent. Society & Natural Resources , 27 , 231–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2013.861554

Use the DOI number for the source whenever one is available. DOI stands for "digital object identifier," a number specific to the article that can help others locate the source. In APA 7, format the DOI as a web address. Active hyperlinks for DOIs and URLs should be used for documents meant for screen reading. Present these hyperlinks in blue and underlined text (the default formatting in Microsoft Word), although plain black text is also acceptable. Be consistent in your formatting choice for DOIs and URLs throughout your reference list. Also see our Quick Answer FAQ, "Can I use the DOI format provided by library databases?"

Jerrentrup, A., Mueller, T., Glowalla, U., Herder, M., Henrichs, N., Neubauer, A., & Schaefer, J. R. (2018). Teaching medicine with the help of “Dr. House.” PLoS ONE , 13 (3), Article e0193972. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193972

For journal articles that are assigned article numbers rather than page ranges, include the article number in place of the page range.

For more on citing electronic resources, see  Electronic Sources References .

Article (Without DOI)

Found in a common academic research database or in print.

Casler , T. (2020). Improving the graduate nursing experience through support on a social media platform. MEDSURG Nursing , 29 (2), 83–87.

If an article does not have a DOI and you retrieved it from a common academic research database through the university library, there is no need to include any additional electronic retrieval information. The reference list entry looks like the entry for a print copy of the article. (This format differs from APA 6 guidelines that recommended including the URL of a journal's homepage when the DOI was not available.) Note that APA 7 has additional guidance on reference list entries for articles found only in specific databases or archives such as Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, UpToDate, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global, and university archives. See APA 7, Section 9.30 for more information.

Found on an Open Access Website

Eaton, T. V., & Akers, M. D. (2007). Whistleblowing and good governance. CPA Journal , 77 (6), 66–71. http://archives.cpajournal.com/2007/607/essentials/p58.htm

Provide the direct web address/URL to a journal article found on the open web, often on an open access journal's website. In APA 7, active hyperlinks for DOIs and URLs should be used for documents meant for screen reading. Present these hyperlinks in blue and underlined text (the default formatting in Microsoft Word), although plain black text is also acceptable. Be consistent in your formatting choice for DOIs and URLs throughout your reference list.

Weinstein, J. A. (2010).  Social change  (3rd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.

If the book has an edition number, include it in parentheses after the title of the book. If the book does not list any edition information, do not include an edition number. The edition number is not italicized.

American Nurses Association. (2015). Nursing: Scope and standards of practice (3rd ed.).

If the author and publisher are the same, only include the author in its regular place and omit the publisher.

Lencioni, P. (2012). The advantage: Why organizational health trumps everything else in business . Jossey-Bass. https://amzn.to/343XPSJ

As a change from APA 6 to APA 7, it is no longer necessary to include the ebook format in the title. However, if you listened to an audiobook and the content differs from the text version (e.g., abridged content) or your discussion highlights elements of the audiobook (e.g., narrator's performance), then note that it is an audiobook in the title element in brackets. For ebooks and online audiobooks, also include the DOI number (if available) or nondatabase URL but leave out the electronic retrieval element if the ebook was found in a common academic research database, as with journal articles. APA 7 allows for the shortening of long DOIs and URLs, as shown in this example. See APA 7, Section 9.36 for more information.

Chapter in an Edited Book

Poe, M. (2017). Reframing race in teaching writing across the curriculum. In F. Condon & V. A. Young (Eds.), Performing antiracist pedagogy in rhetoric, writing, and communication (pp. 87–105). University Press of Colorado.

Include the page numbers of the chapter in parentheses after the book title.

Christensen, L. (2001). For my people: Celebrating community through poetry. In B. Bigelow, B. Harvey, S. Karp, & L. Miller (Eds.), Rethinking our classrooms: Teaching for equity and justice (Vol. 2, pp. 16–17). Rethinking Schools.

Also include the volume number or edition number in the parenthetical information after the book title when relevant.

Freud, S. (1961). The ego and the id. In J. Strachey (Ed.),  The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud  (Vol. 19, pp. 3-66). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923)

When a text has been republished as part of an anthology collection, after the author’s name include the date of the version that was read. At the end of the entry, place the date of the original publication inside parenthesis along with the note “original work published.” For in-text citations of republished work, use both dates in the parenthetical citation, original date first with a slash separating the years, as in this example: Freud (1923/1961). For more information on reprinted or republished works, see APA 7, Sections 9.40-9.41.

Classroom Resources

Citing classroom resources.

If you need to cite content found in your online classroom, use the author (if there is one listed), the year of publication (if available), the title of the document, and the main URL of Walden classrooms. For example, you are citing study notes titled "Health Effects of Exposure to Forest Fires," but you do not know the author's name, your reference entry will look like this:

Health effects of exposure to forest fires [Lecture notes]. (2005). Walden University Canvas. https://waldenu.instructure.com

If you do know the author of the document, your reference will look like this:

Smith, A. (2005). Health effects of exposure to forest fires [PowerPoint slides]. Walden University Canvas. https://waldenu.instructure.com  

A few notes on citing course materials:

• [Lecture notes]
• [Course handout]
• [Study notes]
• It can be difficult to determine authorship of classroom documents. If an author is listed on the document, use that. If the resource is clearly a product of Walden (such as the course-based videos), use Walden University as the author. If you are unsure or if no author is indicated, place the title in the author spot, as above.
• If you cannot determine a date of publication, you can use n.d. (for "no date") in place of the year.

Note:  The web location for Walden course materials is not directly retrievable without a password, and therefore, following APA guidelines, use the main URL for the class sites: https://class.waldenu.edu.

Citing Tempo Classroom Resources

Clear author: 

Smith, A. (2005). Health effects of exposure to forest fires [PowerPoint slides]. Walden University Brightspace. https://mytempo.waldenu.edu

Unclear author:

Health effects of exposure to forest fires [Lecture notes]. (2005). Walden University Brightspace. https://mytempo.waldenu.edu

Conference Sessions and Presentations

Feinman, Y. (2018, July 27). Alternative to proctoring in introductory statistics community college courses [Poster presentation]. Walden University Research Symposium, Minneapolis, MN, United States. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/symposium2018/23/

Torgerson, K., Parrill, J., & Haas, A. (2019, April 5-9). Tutoring strategies for online students [Conference session]. The Higher Learning Commission Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, United States. http://onlinewritingcenters.org/scholarship/torgerson-parrill-haas-2019/

Dictionary Entry

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Leadership. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary . Retrieved May 28, 2020, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/leadership

When constructing a reference for an entry in a dictionary or other reference work that has no byline (i.e., no named individual authors), use the name of the group—the institution, company, or organization—as author (e.g., Merriam Webster, American Psychological Association, etc.). The name of the entry goes in the title position, followed by "In" and the italicized name of the reference work (e.g., Merriam-Webster.com dictionary , APA dictionary of psychology ). In this instance, APA 7 recommends including a retrieval date as well for this online source since the contents of the page change over time. End the reference entry with the specific URL for the defined word.

Discussion Board Post

Osborne, C. S. (2010, June 29). Re: Environmental responsibility [Discussion post]. Walden University Canvas.  https://waldenu.instructure.com  

Dissertations or Theses

Retrieved From a Database

Nalumango, K. (2019). Perceptions about the asylum-seeking process in the United States after 9/11 (Publication No. 13879844) [Doctoral dissertation, Walden University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

Retrieved From an Institutional or Personal Website

Evener. J. (2018). Organizational learning in libraries at for-profit colleges and universities [Doctoral dissertation, Walden University]. ScholarWorks. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6606&context=dissertations

Unpublished Dissertation or Thesis

Kirwan, J. G. (2005). An experimental study of the effects of small-group, face-to-face facilitated dialogues on the development of self-actualization levels: A movement towards fully functional persons [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center.

For further examples and information, see APA 7, Section 10.6.

Legal Material

For legal references, APA follows the recommendations of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation , so if you have any questions beyond the examples provided in APA, seek out that resource as well.

Court Decisions

Reference format:

Name v. Name, Volume Reporter Page (Court Date). URL

Sample reference entry:

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/347us483

Sample citation:

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in schools unconstitutional.

Note: Italicize the case name when it appears in the text of your paper.

Name of Act, Title Source § Section Number (Year). URL

Sample reference entry for a federal statute:

Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 et seq. (2004). https://www.congress.gov/108/plaws/publ446/PLAW-108publ446.pdf

Sample reference entry for a state statute:

Minnesota Nurse Practice Act, Minn. Stat. §§ 148.171 et seq. (2019). https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/148.171

Sample citation: Minnesota nurses must maintain current registration in order to practice (Minnesota Nurse Practice Act, 2010).

Note: The § symbol stands for "section." Use §§ for sections (plural). To find this symbol in Microsoft Word, go to "Insert" and click on Symbol." Look in the Latin 1-Supplement subset. Note: U.S.C. stands for "United States Code." Note: The Latin abbreviation " et seq. " means "and what follows" and is used when the act includes the cited section and ones that follow. Note: List the chapter first followed by the section or range of sections.

Unenacted Bills and Resolutions

(Those that did not pass and become law)

Title [if there is one], bill or resolution number, xxx Cong. (year). URL

Sample reference entry for Senate bill:

Anti-Phishing Act, S. 472, 109th Cong. (2005). https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-bill/472

Sample reference entry for House of Representatives resolution:

Anti-Phishing Act, H.R. 1099, 109th Cong. (2005). https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/1099

The Anti-Phishing Act (2005) proposed up to 5 years prison time for people running Internet scams.

These are the three legal areas you may be most apt to cite in your scholarly work. For more examples and explanation, see APA 7, Chapter 11.

Magazine Article

Clay, R. (2008, June). Science vs. ideology: Psychologists fight back about the misuse of research. Monitor on Psychology , 39 (6). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/06/ideology

Note that for citations, include only the year: Clay (2008). For magazine articles retrieved from a common academic research database, leave out the URL. For magazine articles from an online news website that is not an online version of a print magazine, follow the format for a webpage reference list entry.

Newspaper Article (Retrieved Online)

Baker, A. (2014, May 7). Connecticut students show gains in national tests. New York Times . http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/nyregion/national-assessment-of-educational-progress-results-in-Connecticut-and-New-Jersey.html

Include the full date in the format Year, Month Day. Do not include a retrieval date for periodical sources found on websites. Note that for citations, include only the year: Baker (2014). For newspaper articles retrieved from a common academic research database, leave out the URL. For newspaper articles from an online news website that is not an online version of a print newspaper, follow the format for a webpage reference list entry.

OASIS Resources

Oasis webpage.

OASIS. (n.d.). Common reference list examples . Walden University. https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/apa/references/examples

For all OASIS content, list OASIS as the author. Because OASIS webpages do not include publication dates, use “n.d.” for the year.

Interactive Guide

OASIS. (n.d.). Embrace iterative research and writing [Interactive guide]. Walden University. https://academics.waldenu.edu/oasis/iterative-research-writing-web

For OASIS multimedia resources, such as interactive guides, include a description of the resource in brackets after the title.

Online Video/Webcast

Walden University. (2013).  An overview of learning  [Video]. Walden University Canvas.  https://waldenu.instructure.com  

Use this format for online videos such as Walden videos in classrooms. Most of our classroom videos are produced by Walden University, which will be listed as the author in your reference and citation. Note: Some examples of audiovisual materials in the APA manual show the word “Producer” in parentheses after the producer/author area. In consultation with the editors of the APA manual, we have determined that parenthetical is not necessary for the videos in our courses. The manual itself is unclear on the matter, however, so either approach should be accepted. Note that the speaker in the video does not appear in the reference list entry, but you may want to mention that person in your text. For instance, if you are viewing a video where Tobias Ball is the speaker, you might write the following: Tobias Ball stated that APA guidelines ensure a consistent presentation of information in student papers (Walden University, 2013). For more information on citing the speaker in a video, see our page on Common Citation Errors .

Taylor, R. [taylorphd07]. (2014, February 27). Scales of measurement [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDsMUlexaMY

OASIS. (2020, April 15). One-way ANCOVA: Introduction [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/_XnNDQ5CNW8

For videos from streaming sites, use the person or organization who uploaded the video in the author space to ensure retrievability, whether or not that person is the speaker in the video. A username can be provided in square brackets. As a change from APA 6 to APA 7, include the publisher after the title, and do not use "Retrieved from" before the URL. See APA 7, Section 10.12 for more information and examples.

See also reference list entry formats for TED Talks .

Technical and Research Reports

Edwards, C. (2015). Lighting levels for isolated intersections: Leading to safety improvements (Report No. MnDOT 2015-05). Center for Transportation Studies. http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportdetail.html?id=2402

Technical and research reports by governmental agencies and other research institutions usually follow a different publication process than scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. However, they present original research and are often useful for research papers. Sometimes, researchers refer to these types of reports as gray literature , and white papers are a type of this literature. See APA 7, Section 10.4 for more information.

Reference list entires for TED Talks follow the usual guidelines for multimedia content found online. There are two common places to find TED talks online, with slightly different reference list entry formats for each.

TED Talk on the TED website

If you find the TED Talk on the TED website, follow the format for an online video on an organizational website:

Owusu-Kesse, K. (2020, June). 5 needs that any COVID-19 response should meet [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/kwame_owusu_kesse_5_needs_that_any_covid_19_response_should_meet

The speaker is the author in the reference list entry if the video is posted on the TED website. For citations, use the speaker's surname.

TED Talk on YouTube

If you find the TED Talk on YouTube or another streaming video website, follow the usual format for streaming video sites:

TED. (2021, February 5). The shadow pandemic of domestic violence during COVID-19 | Kemi DaSilvalbru [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGdID_ICFII

TED is the author in the reference list entry if the video is posted on YouTube since it is the channel on which the video is posted. For citations, use TED as the author.

Walden University Course Catalog

To include the Walden course catalog in your reference list, use this format:

Walden University. (2020). 2019-2020 Walden University catalog . https://catalog.waldenu.edu/index.php

If you cite from a specific portion of the catalog in your paper, indicate the appropriate section and paragraph number in your text:

...which reflects the commitment to social change expressed in Walden University's mission statement (Walden University, 2020, Vision, Mission, and Goals section, para. 2).

And in the reference list:

Walden University. (2020). Vision, mission, and goals. In 2019-2020 Walden University catalog. https://catalog.waldenu.edu/content.php?catoid=172&navoid=59420&hl=vision&returnto=search

Vartan, S. (2018, January 30). Why vacations matter for your health . CNN. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/why-vacations-matter/index.html

For webpages on the open web, include the author, date, webpage title, organization/site name, and URL. (There is a slight variation for online versions of print newspapers or magazines. For those sources, follow the models in the previous sections of this page.)

American Federation of Teachers. (n.d.). Community schools . http://www.aft.org/issues/schoolreform/commschools/index.cfm

If there is no specified author, then use the organization’s name as the author. In such a case, there is no need to repeat the organization's name after the title.

In APA 7, active hyperlinks for DOIs and URLs should be used for documents meant for screen reading. Present these hyperlinks in blue and underlined text (the default formatting in Microsoft Word), although plain black text is also acceptable. Be consistent in your formatting choice for DOIs and URLs throughout your reference list.

Related Resources

Knowledge Check: Common Reference List Examples

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What is a thesis?

What is a dissertation, getting started, staying on track.

A thesis is a long-term project that you work on over the course of a semester or a year. Theses have a very wide variety of styles and content, so we encourage you to look at prior examples and work closely with faculty to develop yours. 

Before you begin, make sure that you are familiar with the dissertation genre—what it is for and what it looks like.

Generally speaking, a dissertation’s purpose is to prove that you have the expertise necessary to fulfill your doctoral-degree requirements by showing depth of knowledge and independent thinking.

The form of a dissertation may vary by discipline. Be sure to follow the specific guidelines of your department.

• PhD This site directs candidates to the GSAS website about dissertations , with links to checklists,  planning, formatting, acknowledgments, submission, and publishing options. There is also a link to guidelines for the prospectus . Consult with your committee chair about specific requirements and standards for your dissertation.
• DDES This document covers planning, patent filing, submission guidelines, publishing options, formatting guidelines, sample pages, citation guidelines, and a list of common errors to avoid. There is also a link to guidelines for the prospectus .
• Scholarly Pursuits (GSAS) This searchable booklet from Harvard GSAS is a comprehensive guide to writing dissertations, dissertation-fellowship applications, academic journal articles, and academic job documents.

Finding an original topic can be a daunting and overwhelming task. These key concepts can help you focus and save time.

Finding a topic for your thesis or dissertation should start with a research question that excites or at least interests you. A rigorous, engaging, and original project will require continuous curiosity about your topic, about your own thoughts on the topic, and about what other scholars have said on your topic. Avoid getting boxed in by thinking you know what you want to say from the beginning; let your research and your writing evolve as you explore and fine-tune your focus through constant questioning and exploration.

Get a sense of the broader picture before you narrow your focus and attempt to frame an argument. Read, skim, and otherwise familiarize yourself with what other scholars have done in areas related to your proposed topic. Briefly explore topics tangentially related to yours to broaden your perspective and increase your chance of finding a unique angle to pursue.

Critical Reading

Critical reading is the opposite of passive reading. Instead of merely reading for information to absorb, critical reading also involves careful, sustained thinking about what you are reading. This process may include analyzing the author’s motives and assumptions, asking what might be left out of the discussion, considering what you agree with or disagree with in the author’s statements and why you agree or disagree, and exploring connections or contradictions between scholarly arguments. Here is a resource to help hone your critical-reading skills:

http://writing.umn.edu/sws/assets/pdf/quicktips/criticalread.pdf

Conversation

Your thesis or dissertation will incorporate some ideas from other scholars whose work you researched. By reading critically and following your curiosity, you will develop your own ideas and claims, and these contributions are the core of your project. You will also acknowledge the work of scholars who came before you, and you must accurately and fairly attribute this work and define your place within the larger discussion. Make sure that you know how to quote, summarize, paraphrase ,  integrate , and cite secondary sources to avoid plagiarism and to show the depth and breadth of your knowledge.

A thesis is a long-term, large project that involves both research and writing; it is easy to lose focus, motivation, and momentum. Here are suggestions for achieving the result you want in the time you have.

The dissertation is probably the largest project you have undertaken, and a lot of the work is self-directed. The project can feel daunting or even overwhelming unless you break it down into manageable pieces and create a timeline for completing each smaller task. Be realistic but also challenge yourself, and be forgiving of yourself if you miss a self-imposed deadline here and there.

Your program will also have specific deadlines for different requirements, including establishing a committee, submitting a prospectus, completing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and submitting your work. Consult your department’s website for these dates and incorporate them into the timeline for your work.

Accountability

Sometimes self-imposed deadlines do not feel urgent unless there is accountability to someone beyond yourself. To increase your motivation to complete tasks on schedule, set dates with your committee chair to submit pre-determined pieces of a chapter. You can also arrange with a fellow doctoral student to check on each other’s progress. Research and writing can be lonely, so it is also nice to share that journey with someone and support each other through the process.

Common Pitfalls

The most common challenges for students writing a dissertation are writer’s block, information-overload, and the compulsion to keep researching forever.

There are many strategies for avoiding writer’s block, such as freewriting, outlining, taking a walk, starting in the middle, and creating an ideal work environment for your particular learning style. Pay attention to what helps you and try different things until you find what works.

Efficient researching techniques are essential to avoiding information-overload. Here are a couple of resources about strategies for finding sources and quickly obtaining essential information from them.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/writing_in_literature_detailed_discussion/reading_criticism.html

https://students.dartmouth.edu/academic-skills/learning-resources/learning-strategies/reading-techniques

Finally, remember that there is always more to learn and your dissertation cannot incorporate everything. Follow your curiosity but also set limits on the scope of your work. It helps to create a folder entitled “future projects” for topics and sources that interest you but that do not fit neatly into the dissertation. Also remember that future scholars will build off of your work, so leave something for them to do.

Browsing through theses and dissertations of the past can help to get a sense of your options and gain inspiration but be careful to use current guidelines and refer to your committee instead of relying on these examples for form or formatting.

DASH Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard.

HOLLIS Harvard Library’s catalog provides access to ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global .

MIT Architecture has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

Rhode Island School of Design has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

University of South Florida has a list of their graduates’ dissertations and theses.

Harvard GSD has a list of projects, including theses and professors’ research.

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For example in " Portraits. .." Basso explores joking in intercultural encounters. By finding out who has cited this work, I can find more recent works on this subject.

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References: How to Cite and List Correctly

• First Online: 25 February 2021

Cite this chapter

• C. George Thomas 2  

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When we write an essay, research paper, thesis, or book, it is normal to include information from the work of others or support our arguments by reference to other published works. All such academic documents draw heavily on the ideas and findings of previous and current researchers available through various sources such as books, journals, theses, newspapers, magazines, government reports, or Internet sources. In all these cases, proper referencing is essential in order to ensure easy retrieval of information. Referencing is the name given to the method of showing and acknowledging the sources from which the author has obtained ideas or information.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true. Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965)

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Citation manager tips & tricks, 10 tips for avoiding accidental plagiarism, endnote basics and resources, full text configuration, refworks basics and resources, mendeley basics and resources, zotero basics and resources.

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Bibliographic management software makes it easy to collect and organize references to any type of information, from journal articles to multimedia files. The software also allows students and researchers to insert their citations into papers and format them for publication painlessly.

These suggestions can be applied to most citation management programs.

• Keep one big database for all of your projects. It will make references easier to find later on.   
• Use Groups or Folders to organize you references.
• Add references to your database as soon as you come across them.  This is easy to do with web-based citation managers.  EndNote users can create free EndNote Web accounts, log on  and add references from any computer with Internet access.  Later, synchronize references between EndNote Web and EndNote desktop.
• Do not limit your database to journal articles only .  Include many material types: websites, meeting abstracts, patents, theses, unpublished works, correspondence, tables and charts, etc.  Might have to type these in by hand (if no Direct Export available), but it will be well worth the effort.)
• Link full-text PDFs on your hard drive to the corresponding references in your database.  Some programs will let you import PDFs directly in a batch or one by one.
• Annotate PDFs as a reminder of sections you plan on quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing.
• Every citation manager has a Notes field, Research Notes field or several User Defined fields. Copy text from sources you plan to use into these fields.  This will be a good reminder of what you are quoting.
• As you write, use your citation manager's "insert citation" tool (e.g. Cite-While-You-Write or Write-N-Cite ). Keep the citations unformatted or use astyle that includes authors and dates.  When you are finished you can change to your department or publisher's style.
• Us MS Word's Track Changes and Notes functions to help keep track of article's you are citing.
• Make sure your references are correct!

Example of Custom Fields for quotes and paraphrasing in EndNote

Highlighting and annotating a PDF.

• Keep all of your references in one Library .  It will be easier to find them when you need them.
• Add references as soon as you come across them.  Don't wait until you are starting to write.
• Check for duplicates early & often.  2.5. Update your references.  Check to see if epubs or in-process citations have been published.
• Import publisher-supplied PDFs directly into your Library.
• Use Find Full Text or Attach Files to get PDFs for references already in your Library.  
• Annotate PDFs .  Many programs (including EN, Preview for Macs and Adobe Acrobat Pro) will let you highlight text and add notes.  6.5. Annotate references in you Library, using the Notes, Research Notes, or User-Defined fields.
• Organize with Groups.   References can belong to more than one Group.  It might be helpful to create a separate Group for each section of your manuscript. EndNote creates a temporary, system-generated Group of references being added to a document.  These references can be copied into a regular Group.
• Insert citations as you write.   Make it easier to see who you are citing by using an Author/Date style or unformatted citatations while you write. Change to department- or journal-specified style when you are finished writing.
• Use your word processor's Comments feature as reminders of passages that must be cited.
• Make sure the references you cite are correct!

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• Integrate EndNote and EndNote Web .
• Learn about alternatives to EndNote .

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Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research in your field. Mendeley is a great organization tool for those who have accumulated a large number of PDF files during the research process.

The Mendeley guide will help you

• Add references and PDFs to your Mendeley library
• Create formatted bibliographies
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Zotero is a free bibliographic management tool that allows you to store and organize your references. You can add references from library databases, add books with websites like Amazon.com and WorldCat.org, and manually add any references, such as websites.

The Zotero guide will help you

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How to correctly reference a dissertation

(Last updated: 12 May 2021)

Since 2006, Oxbridge Essays has been the UK’s leading paid essay-writing and dissertation service

We have helped 10,000s of undergraduate, Masters and PhD students to maximise their grades in essays, dissertations, model-exam answers, applications and other materials. If you would like a free chat about your project with one of our UK staff, then please just reach out on one of the methods below.

In academic writing at all levels, referencing is crucial. Knowing how to reference your dissertation correctly will not only give your work the academic finish it needs to pass, but will also support your ideas and arguments so that the person marking it has a clear understanding of your level of knowledge and research on the topic.

In this article, we’ll occasionally use the term ‘scholarly referencing’ – which quite simply means the style of referencing used in the world of academia (as opposed to the references you may include at the end of your CV, for example).

What is scholarly referencing?

Scholarly referencing refers to a series of conventions used to point readers towards sources that you have cited, quoted, or otherwise borrowed from in your work.

There are many different referencing styles (and the three main categories are discussed below), but they all provide the same fundamental pieces of information to enable a reader to go and find a source you've cited in your work and look at it for themselves:

• The author of the work
• The title of the work
• The type of publication (e.g. whole book, book chapter, journal article, webpage)
• The date of publication of the specific edition of the work you're using (if you're using a specific edition of a classic text, it's of more practical use for a reader to know that the edition you're referring to was published in, say, 2000, than that the original was published in 1818, though this information is sometimes provided in square brackets in the bibliography in addition to the year of the current edition)
• The publisher and place of publication
• If applicable, additional details (volume and issue number, page range) to enable your reader to find the specific source

Why and when do I reference?

Avoiding plagiarism.

The first reason most universities will give for why accurate citation is crucial is that it protects you from accusations of plagiarism . You need to provide a reference to any work done by others that you've incorporated into your own work. This does not just refer to direct quotations but also to paraphrases, data, and even broad "schools of thought", or ways of thinking about a topic.

Plagiarism is not always dishonest – you may not be intentionally passing off someone else's work as your own – but if you don't cite any source that may have influenced your thinking you're open to plagiarism accusations.

If you're in any doubt about whether a source has influenced an assertion you're making, cite it!

Other reasons

Beyond covering yourself, though, there are a couple of other reasons why you should practise good citation habits. Specifically, these have to do with your development as a scholar and your participation in the collective creation of knowledge:

• Readers of your work may want to engage with it directly, or it may simply stimulate their own thinking. Either way, it's common scholarly courtesy to make sure anyone who reads your work can trace the influences on your thinking, data, and methodology in a clear and transparent way.
• Citing other scholars extensively helps you to make the implicit rhetorical argument that you're well-read and informed on your subject, and readers are more likely to be convinced by your argument if you identify and cite reputable scholarly work that supports your interpretations.

What referencing system do I use?

In short, you may not have much of a choice. If you're lucky your university will let you choose between their preferred styles of parenthetical referencing and footnote referencing (for Arts or Humanities subjects) or their preferred parenthetical and numerical styles (for Sciences or Social Sciences).

If you do get a choice, read the “usage” sections for each referencing type below, and ask yourself the following questions:

• How many sources am I going to cite?
• Will I engage closely with a lot of my sources, or am I likely to cite briefly and in volume to note general trends in my field or in the literature?
• Will I use direct quotation or paraphrase?

If you're fortunate enough to have a choice in your referencing system, these questions should help you decide between the alternatives before you.

How do I reference my sources effectively and consistently?

Be systematic.

If you're referencing a dissertation, you're likely to have many tens if not hundreds of sources. If you think of your bibliography as something separate from the process of researching and writing and plan to leave it till the end, remembering every single source you cited and finding all its bibliographic details is going to be a daunting task, to say the least. You need to develop a systematic way of tracking and organising works you've read and cited, both for your own retrieval later and for use in in-text citations and your bibliography.

Use software to help you

There are various ways to do this: you might prefer to set up a spreadsheet or just keep thorough notes as you research. But by far the most efficient way to store, retrieve, and cite the sources you find – especially if you're working with lots of recent, online sources – is to use reference management software . Universities often have subscriptions to commercial packages like RefWorks and EndNote, but you can still save a lot of time with a freeware package like Zotero (though it has far less sophisticated bibliography-generating tools, and with far fewer citation formats, than the commercial tools).

Reference management software packages typically contain some or all of the following features:

• A database that you can organise into multiple folders (for example, one folder per chapter) to rationalise large numbers of sources
• A comprehensive set of fields corresponding to the information typically required by citation systems
• One or more mechanisms for automatically generating records (for example, web plugins that can grab citation details direct from certain pages; DOI searches that download citation data from the web; the ability to import text or XML files of entire bibliographic database searches)
• Word processor plugins (for Word or LibreOffice/OpenOffice) that allow you to insert in-text citations – both in footnote and parenthetical form
• One or more means of generating bibliographies and reference lists – usually both as a text list directly from the programme or as a set of fields based on the sources cited using the word processor plugin

These software packages can be hugely efficient time savers, allowing you to easily catalogue, retrieve and annotate sources as you research, and generating citations and even a complete bibliography for your project.

Do be aware, though, that auto-generated bibliographies won't always be 100% accurate. You might, for example, have to fill in missing pieces of information like place of publication for certain records, or reformat bibliographies to match your department's requirements.

Parenthetical referencing styles

Parenthetical referencing styles are the most common scholarly styles in use, and are employed across a wide range of academic disciplines, with different formats dominant in different fields.

MLA and Chicago tend to dominate in Arts and Humanities disciplines (especially in North America); APA is very common in the Social Sciences, while one of the many variants of the Harvard system can turn up in any discipline anywhere in the world!

Parenthetical styles generally work on the basis of economy. They allow the reader to quickly and easily locate a source in the reference list at the end of a work (in most parenthetical referencing formats this is labelled "References" or "Works Cited" and includes only sources directly cited in the written work), with a minimal disruption of the flow of the writing in which they appear. Because of their emphasis on economy, parenthetical styles generally mandate that you include the author's name in the parenthetical reference only if it's not clear from the context. So, if you introduce a quote with "Smith says that…" you wouldn't normally repeat Smith's name a few words later in parentheses.

Format and features (author-date systems)

Most parenthetical referencing systems use an "author-date" format. The parenthetical reference includes the author's surname and the year of publication (or just the year of publication if the author's name is clear from the context). So you might see, for example;

Scholars often complain that there are "far too many referencing styles for the young scholar to keep track of" (Smith 2012, p. 6)

Smith argues that "There are far too many referencing styles for the young scholar to keep track of" (2012, p. 6).

The year is always the first piece of information after the author's name in the reference list to allow you to quickly and easily match up a parenthetical reference with a bibliographic entry. Author-date entries must always form a unique identifier for a particular source – if a scholar has been exceptionally busy in a given year and produced multiple papers that are being cited in the present written work, the convention is to refer to them, both in-text and in the reference list, using the convention 2012a, 2012b, etc.

Page referencing conventions can vary considerably from format to format, depending on the discipline in which a referencing style is generally used. APA, for example, is designed for use in Social Sciences contexts and doesn't have a straightforward built-in mechanism for specifying page numbers, since it is expected that the vast majority of the time it will be used to reference paraphrases and summaries rather than direct quotations. When using APA to provide direct page number references it is recommended that the author and date be included when introducing the citation and the page reference be provided in a separate parenthetical note at the end of the citation;

Smith (2012) argues that "There are far too many referencing styles for the young scholar to keep track of" (p. 6).

The Harvard "system"

Harvard deserves a special mention among author-date systems: while it's very likely that your university uses Harvard for referencing in at least some disciplines, it's also equally likely that your university's idea of what Harvard referencing looks like is slightly different from any of its neighbouring universities. Whereas referencing styles like Chicago and MLA form part of detailed style guides that provide explicit rules on many aspects of scholarly writing (not just referencing), Harvard simply defines the types of information that should be included in a reference and some broad principles about formatting.

There are almost as many variations of the Harvard system as there are institutions and publications that use it, and though the variations are generally pretty minor they include things like the following:

• Whether authors' names are capitalised in the references list
• Whether "p." or just a number is used when referring to page numbers
• Whether a comma separates the author and date in the parenthetical reference (Smith 2012 or Smith, 2012)
• The organisation and formatting of various bibliographic elements

Confusingly, you very often won't find universities acknowledging these differences; go to almost any university library's guide to referencing and it will claim to be offering an authoritative guide to the Harvard System, not one variation among many – it's up to you to identify where other referencing guides or software don't agree.

You need to pay particularly close attention to this if you're using reference management software to keep track of your sources and generate your bibliography. If you set it to output a reference list in "Harvard" you can be almost certain that your list won't quite match the format your university expects and you'll have to do some manual formatting to get it right. Some reference managers include several variants of Harvard; you should experiment with these and pick the one that gets as close as possible to your format, but again you'll be lucky to find a 100% match.

Format and features (MLA)

MLA is something of a special case among parenthetical referencing systems as it doesn't use dates to identify works. It aims to be even more economical than author-date systems by identifying sources by author's name only and using minimal punctuation in the parenthetical reference, for example Scholars often complain that there are "far too many referencing styles for the young scholar to keep track of" (Smith 6). In the event that a written work contains more than one work by a single author, that work is identified by the shortest possible reference to its title, for example;

Scholars often complain that there are "far too many referencing styles for the young scholar to keep track of" (Smith, Scholar's 6).

Example of use

Note: the examples of sources used here and throughout this post are fictitious.

Scholars often complain that there are "far too many referencing styles for the young scholar to keep track of" (Smith 2012, 6).

In the References list:

Smith, Arnold. 2012. The Scholar's Complete Guide to Referencing. London: Scholar's Press.

Examples of parenthetical styles

• Chicago (author-date)
• MLA (Modern Language Association)
• APA (American Psychological Association)

Footnote / endnote referencing styles

Footnote referencing styles are most common in Arts and Humanities subjects (especially in the UK and Commonwealth countries), where direct quotation of sources – often at length – is commonplace and footnoting is also frequently used as a means of adding additional quotations, context, or clarifying comments. Footnote referencing styles almost always include page numbers when available (the exception being "classic" literary texts that exist in a multitude of editions and are more usually referenced by chapter, line, scene, or stanza number as appropriate). This referencing style works on the assumption that readers may want to go and find the source of specific quotations as they read, possibly to establish the context or to better understand the theory or argument behind the quotation. It's not uncommon in a heavily referenced book or journal article to see footnotes containing bibliographic references and other material take up half a page or more!

Format and features

A number in superscript font (or, more rarely, parentheses, especially for work published online) at the end of a quotation or assertion indicates that the text is supplemented by a note. In most footnoting styles the note will be at the bottom of the page on which its corresponding number appears, or on an adjacent page if the word processing software's text formatting rules dictate that the page footer has become too large. The footer section is usually separated by a horizontal rule to separate it from the body of the page, and the note is found next to its corresponding number. Less common endnote referencing styles – and variations of footnote styles used by certain university departments or publications – collect all notes at the end of the chapter or work.

The level of detail given in the footnote may depend on whether or not the referencing style also uses a bibliography. If a bibliography is used, the footnote may contain only sufficient detail to find the source in the bibliography – for example the work's author and title – and a page reference for the citation. Unlike other referencing formats, footnote referencing styles generally don't restrict bibliographies to containing only sources directly cited in the work; you are free to include all sources you consulted in writing your work, irrespective of whether you cited them or not.

Some footnote referencing styles don't use a separate bibliography at the end of the written work, which means that the entire bibliographic details for the article must be contained in the footnote. However, two of the most common footnote referencing styles, Oxford and MHRA, generally require that the full bibliographic details be given in the footnote and in an alphabetised bibliography (although publications using MHRA in particular may choose to omit the bibliography, universities tend to require it). Generally a shortened note form (author, title, page reference) is permissible for subsequent footnotes after the one in which the source is first introduced.

Smith argues that "There are far too many referencing styles for the young scholar to keep track of".1

In the footer:

1 Arnold Smith, The Scholar's Complete Guide to Referencing (London: Scholar's Press, 2012), p. 6.

In the bibliography:

Smith, Arnold, The Scholar's Complete Guide to Referencing (London: Scholar's Press, 2012).

Examples of footnote styles

• MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association)
• Chicago (footnote style)

Numbered referencing styles

Numbered referencing styles are usually restricted to the sciences. They cater for contexts in which very large numbers of sources are likely to be referenced in brief or in paraphrase, with as many as 5-10 sources used to support a single assertion or argument, but where direct quotation is rarely if even used. The use of numbers as shorthand to refer to bibliographic records is an ideal solution for situations in which sources are referenced in such high volumes that even the briefest parenthetical citation style would still lead to unacceptably long interruptions in the flow of the text.

Each source is assigned a unique number, depending on when it first appears in the text. The number is inserted in parentheses in the text (not normally in superscript format, unlike with footnotes) and the same number is used for every subsequent reference to that source. References are listed at the end of the document in numerical (not alphabetical) format for easy retrieval. Numerical references are very well-suited to publications whose sole or primary medium is electronic, as the numerical references to sources can be hyperlinked very unobtrusively to their corresponding entries in the reference list.

Scholars often complain about the high number of different referencing systems a university student might have to learn during the course of his or her studies (1-4).

In the references list: 1. Smith A. The Scholar's Complete Guide to Referencing. London: Scholar's Press; 2012.

Examples of numerical styles

By far the most common standardised numerical referencing style is Vancouver. However, many universities just refer in generic terms to "the numeric style" without specifically identifying it as Vancouver style. As with Harvard referencing, the detailed implementation of these styles varies somewhat from university to university and publication to publication, but they are typically close variants of the Vancouver system, and setting your referencing software to output a Vancouver-style bibliography should get you fairly close to the style your department is looking for.

How referencing is changing – electronic sources and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

A Digital Object Identifier , or DOI, is an ISO standardised and increasingly commonplace way of referencing online sources. It works like a cross between an ISBN and a URL. Like an ISBN, it's a unique, stable identifier for a particular digital source that allows you to look it up in a database; like a URL it also functions as a type of “address”, helping you identify not only what the object is but where it is.

The overwhelming majority of new articles published in online journals are now assigned a DOI, and the information about that DOI (including the article’s author, title, and publication date, and the name, volume and issue of the journal in which it was published) is stored in a centralised database as metadata.

This is great news if you're using reference management software: simply input an article’s DOI and the software will download the associated metadata and create a full bibliographic record from it!

But best of all, one of the metadata properties that is stored and regularly updated for the DOI is the URL of the article. Enter any object’s DOI into a web browser preceded by http://dx.doi.org/ and it should resolve to the best current place to access the text of the article. If the article is open-access this will generally be a page on which the article’s full text is published; otherwise it's likely to be a login page from which you can gain access via either an institutional or personal account.

To an extent, referencing systems are still playing catchup with DOIs, although the most recent editions of APA and MLA both contain full guidance on citing online sources using DOIs (which are now explicitly preferred to URLs where they're available) and even allow you to omit some other key details about the source if you do provide a DOI.

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• Citing sources

How to Cite Sources | Citation Generator & Quick Guide

Citing your sources is essential in  academic writing . Whenever you quote or paraphrase a source (such as a book, article, or webpage), you have to include a  citation crediting the original author.

Failing to properly cite your sources counts as plagiarism , since you’re presenting someone else’s ideas as if they were your own.

The most commonly used citation styles are APA and MLA. The free Scribbr Citation Generator is the quickest way to cite sources in these styles. Simply enter the URL, DOI, or title, and we’ll generate an accurate, correctly formatted citation.

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Table of contents

When do you need to cite sources, which citation style should you use, in-text citations, reference lists and bibliographies.

Scribbr Citation Generator

Other useful citation tools

Citation examples and full guides, frequently asked questions about citing sources.

Citations are required in all types of academic texts. They are needed for several reasons:

• To avoid plagiarism by indicating when you’re taking information from another source
• To give proper credit to the author of that source
• To allow the reader to consult your sources for themselves

A citation is needed whenever you integrate a source into your writing. This usually means quoting or paraphrasing:

• To quote a source , copy a short piece of text word for word and put it inside quotation marks .
• To paraphrase a source , put the text into your own words. It’s important that the paraphrase is not too close to the original wording. You can use the paraphrasing tool if you don’t want to do this manually.

Citations are needed whether you quote or paraphrase, and whatever type of source you use. As well as citing scholarly sources like books and journal articles, don’t forget to include citations for any other sources you use for ideas, examples, or evidence. That includes websites, YouTube videos , and lectures .

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Usually, your institution (or the journal you’re submitting to) will require you to follow a specific citation style, so check your guidelines or ask your instructor.

In some cases, you may have to choose a citation style for yourself. Make sure to pick one style and use it consistently:

• APA Style is widely used in the social sciences and beyond.
• MLA style is common in the humanities.
• Chicago notes and bibliography , common in the humanities
• Chicago author-date , used in the (social) sciences
• There are many other citation styles for different disciplines.

If in doubt, check with your instructor or read other papers from your field of study to see what style they follow.

In most styles, your citations consist of:

• Brief in-text citations at the relevant points in the text
• A reference list or bibliography containing full information on all the sources you’ve cited

In-text citations most commonly take the form of parenthetical citations featuring the last name of the source’s author and its year of publication (aka author-date citations).

An alternative to this type of in-text citation is the system used in numerical citation styles , where a number is inserted into the text, corresponding to an entry in a numbered reference list.

There are also note citation styles , where you place your citations in either footnotes or endnotes . Since they’re not embedded in the text itself, these citations can provide more detail and sometimes aren’t accompanied by a full reference list or bibliography.

A reference list (aka “Bibliography” or “Works Cited,” depending on the style) is where you provide full information on each of the sources you’ve cited in the text. It appears at the end of your paper, usually with a hanging indent applied to each entry.

The information included in reference entries is broadly similar, whatever citation style you’re using. For each source, you’ll typically include the:

• Author name
• Publication date
• Container (e.g., the book an essay was published in, the journal an article appeared in)
• Location (e.g., a URL or DOI , or sometimes a physical location)

The exact information included varies depending on the source type and the citation style. The order in which the information appears, and how you format it (e.g., capitalization, use of italics) also varies.

Most commonly, the entries in your reference list are alphabetized by author name. This allows the reader to easily find the relevant entry based on the author name in your in-text citation.

In numerical citation styles, the entries in your reference list are numbered, usually based on the order in which you cite them. The reader finds the right entry based on the number that appears in the text.

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Because each style has many small differences regarding things like italicization, capitalization , and punctuation , it can be difficult to get every detail right. Using a citation generator can save you a lot of time and effort.

Scribbr offers citation generators for both APA and MLA style. Both are quick, easy to use, and 100% free, with no ads and no registration required.

Just input a URL or DOI or add the source details manually, and the generator will automatically produce an in-text citation and reference entry in the correct format. You can save your reference list as you go and download it when you’re done, and even add annotations for an annotated bibliography .

Once you’ve prepared your citations, you might still be unsure if they’re correct and if you’ve used them appropriately in your text. This is where Scribbr’s other citation tools and services may come in handy:

Plagiarism Checker

Citation Checker

Citation Editing

Plagiarism means passing off someone else’s words or ideas as your own. It’s a serious offense in academia. Universities use plagiarism checking software to scan your paper and identify any similarities to other texts.

When you’re dealing with a lot of sources, it’s easy to make mistakes that could constitute accidental plagiarism. For example, you might forget to add a citation after a quote, or paraphrase a source in a way that’s too close to the original text.

Using a plagiarism checker yourself before you submit your work can help you spot these mistakes before they get you in trouble. Based on the results, you can add any missing citations and rephrase your text where necessary.

Try out the Scribbr Plagiarism Checker for free, or check out our detailed comparison of the best plagiarism checkers available online.

Scribbr Plagiarism Checker

Scribbr’s Citation Checker is a unique AI-powered tool that automatically detects stylistic errors and inconsistencies in your in-text citations. It also suggests a correction for every mistake.

Currently available for APA Style, this is the fastest and easiest way to make sure you’ve formatted your citations correctly. You can try out the tool for free below.

If you need extra help with your reference list, we also offer a more in-depth Citation Editing Service.

Our experts cross-check your in-text citations and reference entries, make sure you’ve included the correct information for each source, and improve the formatting of your reference page.

If you want to handle your citations yourself, Scribbr’s free Knowledge Base provides clear, accurate guidance on every aspect of citation. You can see citation examples for a variety of common source types below:

And you can check out our comprehensive guides to the most popular citation styles:

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The abbreviation “ et al. ” (Latin for “and others”) is used to shorten citations of sources with multiple authors.

“Et al.” is used in APA in-text citations of sources with 3+ authors, e.g. (Smith et al., 2019). It is not used in APA reference entries .

Use “et al.” for 3+ authors in MLA in-text citations and Works Cited entries.

Use “et al.” for 4+ authors in a Chicago in-text citation , and for 10+ authors in a Chicago bibliography entry.

The Scribbr Citation Generator is developed using the open-source Citation Style Language (CSL) project and Frank Bennett’s citeproc-js . It’s the same technology used by dozens of other popular citation tools, including Mendeley and Zotero.

You can find all the citation styles and locales used in the Scribbr Citation Generator in our publicly accessible repository on Github .

APA format is widely used by professionals, researchers, and students in the social and behavioral sciences, including fields like education, psychology, and business.

Be sure to check the guidelines of your university or the journal you want to be published in to double-check which style you should be using.

MLA Style  is the second most used citation style (after APA ). It is mainly used by students and researchers in humanities fields such as literature, languages, and philosophy.

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How to collect data for your thesis

Collecting theoretical data

Search for theses on your topic, use content-sharing platforms, collecting empirical data, qualitative vs. quantitative data, frequently asked questions about gathering data for your thesis, related articles.

After choosing a topic for your thesis , you’ll need to start gathering data. In this article, we focus on how to effectively collect theoretical and empirical data.

Empirical data : unique research that may be quantitative, qualitative, or mixed.

Theoretical data : secondary, scholarly sources like books and journal articles that provide theoretical context for your research.

Thesis : the culminating, multi-chapter project for a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree.

Qualitative data : info that cannot be measured, like observations and interviews .

Quantitative data : info that can be measured and written with numbers.

At this point in your academic life, you are already acquainted with the ways of finding potential references. Some obvious sources of theoretical material are:

• edited volumes
• conference proceedings
• online databases like Google Scholar , ERIC , or Scopus

You can also take a look at the top list of academic search engines .

Looking at other theses on your topic can help you see what approaches have been taken and what aspects other writers have focused on. Pay close attention to the list of references and follow the bread-crumbs back to the original theories and specialized authors.

Another method for gathering theoretical data is to read through content-sharing platforms. Many people share their papers and writings on these sites. You can either hunt sources, get some inspiration for your own work or even learn new angles of your topic. 

Some popular content sharing sites are:

With these sites, you have to check the credibility of the sources. You can usually rely on the content, but we recommend double-checking just to be sure. Take a look at our guide on what are credible sources?

The more you know, the better. The guide, " How to undertake a literature search and review for dissertations and final year projects ," will give you all the tools needed for finding literature .

In order to successfully collect empirical data, you have to choose first what type of data you want as an outcome. There are essentially two options, qualitative or quantitative data. Many people mistake one term with the other, so it’s important to understand the differences between qualitative and quantitative research .

Boiled down, qualitative data means words and quantitative means numbers. Both types are considered primary sources . Whichever one adapts best to your research will define the type of methodology to carry out, so choose wisely.

In the end, having in mind what type of outcome you intend and how much time you count on will lead you to choose the best type of empirical data for your research. For a detailed description of each methodology type mentioned above, read more about collecting data .

Once you gather enough theoretical and empirical data, you will need to start writing. But before the actual writing part, you have to structure your thesis to avoid getting lost in the sea of information. Take a look at our guide on how to structure your thesis for some tips and tricks.

The key to knowing what type of data you should collect for your thesis is knowing in advance the type of outcome you intend to have, and the amount of time you count with.

Some obvious sources of theoretical material are journals, libraries and online databases like Google Scholar , ERIC or Scopus , or take a look at the top list of academic search engines . You can also search for theses on your topic or read content sharing platforms, like Medium , Issuu , or Slideshare .

To gather empirical data, you have to choose first what type of data you want. There are two options, qualitative or quantitative data. You can gather data through observations, interviews, focus groups, or with surveys, tests, and existing databases.

Qualitative data means words, information that cannot be measured. It may involve multimedia material or non-textual data. This type of data claims to be detailed, nuanced and contextual.

Quantitative data means numbers, information that can be measured and written with numbers. This type of data claims to be credible, scientific and exact.

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Within the genre of “independent academic writing” you are participating in an academic research tradition, where you – as a co-creater of knowledge – are obligated to make your work available for reproduction. I.e. your reader needs to have access to the cited sources, through which they can verify the authenticity and validity of the information used in your research.

A reference is a referral to anothers text or information and can refer to written sources (books, reports, articles), computer programmes, videos, cd’s, internet sites, images, etc. It can also refer to personal communication in the form of letters, e-mails or interviews. A reference is synonymous with a literary citation or citing a source.

If you forget to use references, or your references are incomplete, your work can seem like an empty postulation or create suspicions of plagiarism. As described earlier, plagiarism is looked upon with gravity, and can in extreme cases lead to expulsion.

General knowledge does not require a reference References are not required when the applied knowledge is part of a common professional base, and can be termed as “general knowledge”, e.g.:

“Eating fruits, vegetables, little fat and being physically active promote health”.

But if one wants to write more detailed concrete information on: how does fruit and vegetable consumption, decreased consumption of fat and increased physical activity influence health, numerical relations, or explain mechanisms then references need to be provided, e.g.:

A series of meta-analyses have reviewed the overall effects of the multiple –micronutrient supplements on maternal anemia and micronutrient status (Allen & Peerson, 2009), size of birth and length gestation (Fall, Fisher, Osmond, Margetts, 2009), and neonatal mortality (Ronsmans et al., 2009).

Source:  Merson MH, Black RE, Mills AJ, 2012,  Global health; diseases, programs, systems and policies , Third edition, Jones & Bartlett Learning, Burlington, USA.

What exactly does a reference contain? Learn how to write references in the following.

Different schools / types of referencing At the Faculty of Health the most common schools are Vancouver and Harvard, but this can vary from institute to institute. Consult your course guidelines and contact your supervisor for information about the preferred standard for referencing.

Overall, a book reference should always include the following information:

• Year of Publication
• Title: possibly subtitle (always in italics)
• Place of Publication

Done by the Harvard standard, e.g.: Kjøller, M & Rasmussen, NK (red.) 2002, Sundhed og sygelighed i Danmark 2000 og udviklingen siden 1987, Statens Institut for Folkesundhed, København.

A reference to a journal article should always include the following:

• Title of the article
• Title of the journal (always in italics)
• Vol. / #, pagenumber.

Done by the Harvard standard, e.g.:

Waldorff, FB et al. 2002, ‘Strategier for demensdiagnostik: erfaringer fra samarbejdet mellem praktiserende læger og hjemmesygeplejersker’, Ugeskrift for læger , årg. 164, nr. 32, pp 3767-3770.

References to oral sources (e.g. interviews) should include the following:

• The person or focus group
• The place (or institution)

E.g.: Conversation with Head Doctor NN, Rigshospitalet, 27.11.2012.

Where does one insert a reference?

References should be written in-text (as parantheses), at the bottom of the page (as footnotes) or as endnotes in a seperate notes section at the end of a chapter or at the end of the thesis.

References in parantheses need to be short, so they don’t disrupt the reading, and can for instance be used as page references (see also page 45), as references to an appendix (see appendix 2) or as a reference to literature (Moss, 2013, p 195). Used to reference literature, the reference must refer to the bibliography.

References in footnotes should include more details, but should not span more than three lines, e.g.:

______________________________________

Moss, Michael, 2013, Salt, Sugar, Fat – how the Foot Giants Hooked us , House Publishing Group, New York

If one has many references for each page, it can be a good idea to unify these after a chapter. Done by the Harvard standard it could look like:

• Nielsen, JP 2001, ‘Smerter hos børn’ I: U Fasting & L Lundorff (red.), Smerter og smertebehandling i klinisk praksis . Munksgaard, København, s. 181-193.
• Steinhaug S, Ahlsen B & Malterud K 2001, ‘From exercise and education to movement and interaction: treatment groups in primary care for women with chronic muscular pain’, Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care , årg.19, nr. 4, s. 249-254.
• Benner, P & Wrubel, J 2001, Omsorgens betydning i sygepleje . Munksgaard, København.
• Waldorff, FB et al. 2002, ‘ Strategier for demensdiagnostik: erfaringer fra samarbejdet mellem praktiserende læger og hjemmesygeplejersker ‘, Ugeskrift for læger, årg. 164, nr. 32, s. 3767-3770.

No matter which referencial standard you use, you should use this type consistently. I.e. format all of your references the same, throughout your assignment. A good method of ensuring this is to use bibliographic software.

Learn how use bibliographic software in the following.

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To be made up of:

• Year of submission (in round brackets).
• Title of thesis (in italics).
• Degree statement.
• Degree-awarding body.
• Available at: URL.
• (Accessed: date).

In-text citation: 

(Smith, 2019)

Reference List:  

Smith, E. R. C. (2019). Conduits of invasive species into the UK: the angling route? Ph. D. Thesis. University College London. Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10072700 (Accessed: 20 May 2021).

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Title Page Setup

A title page is required for all APA Style papers. There are both student and professional versions of the title page. Students should use the student version of the title page unless their instructor or institution has requested they use the professional version. APA provides a student title page guide (PDF, 199KB) to assist students in creating their title pages.

Student title page

The student title page includes the paper title, author names (the byline), author affiliation, course number and name for which the paper is being submitted, instructor name, assignment due date, and page number, as shown in this example.

Title page setup is covered in the seventh edition APA Style manuals in the Publication Manual Section 2.3 and the Concise Guide Section 1.6

Related handouts

• Student Title Page Guide (PDF, 263KB)
• Student Paper Setup Guide (PDF, 3MB)

Student papers do not include a running head unless requested by the instructor or institution.

Follow the guidelines described next to format each element of the student title page.

Professional title page

The professional title page includes the paper title, author names (the byline), author affiliation(s), author note, running head, and page number, as shown in the following example.

Follow the guidelines described next to format each element of the professional title page.

More From Forbes

The power of effective communication in leadership.

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Chief Growth Officer of Tynker , a leading K-12 edtech platform that has helped more than 100 million kids learn to code.

Whether running a small startup or an entire nation, great leaders must leverage effective communication skills. Consider some of the leaders who reshaped history—Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and even Napoleon. All of them were masters of relatable language.

Good communication skills are also crucial for leaders in the corporate world for inspiring both stakeholders outside the company and uniting the internal team into one cohesive group. Strong relationships can boost company resilience and success while increasing talent retention rates.

Effective Communication: Two-Way Vs. One-Way

Influential leaders practice two-way communication, motivating and building solid relationships with team members.​​

As a leader, it is crucial to understand the importance of both one-way and two-way communication. Sometimes, you will have to communicate to your team decisions that have already been made and directives that must be followed.​​ Regardless of the situation, allowing your team members to voice their disagreements about decisions is key—because understanding their concerns is important. However, framing your communication clearly and addressing any concerns before they are presented can lead to faster acceptance.

Here are six characteristics of effective communication in leadership.

Active Listening

Good leaders are active listeners. They don't just listen to the comments and feedback from their team; they process, retain, discuss and, if possible, incorporate it into the decision-making process. When team members feel like they are heard, it builds morale.

​​Leaders should also encourage and facilitate this trait within the team to build better relationships among team members. Open-door policies, communication with individual team members, positive reactions to feedback and constructive debates can help you lead by example.

Team building activities like having discussions on common issues using a chess clock (where each member gets the same time to talk) can drive home the importance of listening.

Individual Communication Styles

​​It would be best if you introduced multiple modes of communication to accommodate your team members. Some people ​​prefer face-to-face interactions, while others might find it more comfortable chatting on Slack. Not everyone will be comfortable presenting to the whole team, but they might communicate their ideas well with an infographic or a shared presentation where people can comment in real time.

​​As a leader, you ​must​​​ understand that each team member's perspective of effective communication differs and might need the right channel to express themselves adequately.

Introducing and encouraging multiple ​communication channels​​​ can inspire the team to share ideas and exchange information more frequently.

Conciseness And Clarity

​​Don't let your communication drown in a sea of words. More information can just as easily confuse the listener as ​insufficient​​​ information. This is valid for all forms of communication. That's why TEDx Talks are designed to be 18 minutes long at most —to keep the audience's attention. ​ ​​

​​Short emails, memos and concise instructions can communicate your point better than large blocks of text. Clarity and conciseness can help team members absorb the necessary information and remain on the same page. This creates cohesion and motivates the team to pursue goals together. ​​​

For example, if a CFO writes a memo to the entire team ​​with finance-specific lingo, it likely won't be as effective in conveying its point to designers, IT, or anyone else on the team not familiar with the finance language. Leadership communication should be clear to all team members. Amazon's six-page memos that serve as a replacement for traditional PowerPoint presentations were introduced to achieve more clarification in communication.

Relatability

​​The key to building strong relationships and inspiring teams through communication is to humanize the information you wish to convey and make it more relatable. This is a common practice in education, where complex ideas are broken down and communicated through simple, relatable examples.

You don't have to break down everything in layperson's terms, and you can make your communication relatable by using references from your industry that all team members would understand. They will appreciate your effort and desire to help them understand what is being communicated.

Transparency

​​Transparency is a crucial characteristic of leadership communication, especially if your goal is to establish trust with your team members. If your employees don't know the organization's purpose or do not understand its values, you will have a hard time inspiring them.

​​ Buffer is a good example of a company employing transparent communication; the leadership team publicly shares information like salaries, time off and specific financial metrics. ​​

An organization's leaders being transparent with its employees about their intentions, company goals, financials and other aspects can foster trust and ​​lead to better relationships and team unity.

Consistency

​​Finally, leaders must be consistent in their communication. If the values, ideas and missions they communicate differ ​occasionally​​​ and among team members, it will lead to distrust against the leader. Inconsistent communication also damages team cohesion. ​ ​​

If some team members receive constant feedback from the leader and other members merely receive any communication when there is an issue, they may feel left out.

Achieving Collaboration Through Clear Communication

In the realm of leadership, effective communication is essential for building healthy relationships, both personal and professional. Leaders who communicate well can inspire team members and achieve shared goals.

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Is ‘weird-checking’ the new fact-checking?

Aug 12, 2024

Examining social psychological principles that explain why Democrats’ strategy of calling ideas “weird” works.

This blog post was co-authored by Madeline Jalbert , a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and Ira Hyman , a psychology professor at Western Washington University.

• Democrats have recently started to call some Republican attitudes and behaviors “weird” — a strategy we refer to as weird-checking . The approach shares many similarities with social norm interventions that social psychologists have found to be effective.
• Our own attitudes and behaviors are heavily guided by perceived social norms — what we think others believe and do. Unfortunately, people frequently have incorrect views of which ideas are widely shared. Extreme and minority views are often overrepresented in the media, making them appear to be more common and acceptable than they are.
• Weird-checking communicates what others actually believe and can disrupt these inflated perceptions of consensus . It can also orient us to more carefully consider whether the attitude or behavior is consistent with societal values and expectations. This strategy can be used to address problematic attitudes and behaviors that can not be addressed through traditional fact-checking methods

That’s just weird . Over the last few weeks, you have probably seen Democrats referring to some Republican ideas and policy proposals as weird. Thanks to Tim Walz, the Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential nominee, weird has become a central part of the political discourse. The news media is currently flooded with discussion of this new strategy and its success, with a few examples of recent headlines including “Democrats Embrace ‘Weird’ Messaging on Trump” (from The New York Times ), “Why the ‘Weird’ Label is Working for Kamala Harris’” (from the BBC ), and “‘Weird’ is Democrat’s Most Effective Insult” (from The Washington Post ). This approach represents a shift away from Democrat’s standard fact-checking attempts (see this recent TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick for a discussion). We’ve started to refer to this strategy as “weird-checking” — like fact-checking, but checking if something is weird instead of checking if it’s true.

Why does weird-checking work? One key reason for its success can be explained by its appeal to social norms, which play a powerful role in whether we accept or reject an idea or action. As individuals, we look to what others believe and endorse to inform our own attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Schwarz & Jalbert, 2021 ). The phenomenon of checking our ideas and actions against what others believe and do is referred to as “social proof” (Cialdini, 2009) — if something has broad acceptance, there must be something to it (Festinger, 1954) . When we see that others endorse a message, we’re also more likely to endorse it (Cialdini, 2009) . 

Unfortunately, we may not know what other people think. This is because our perceptions of what others believe and do are often constructed through our own experiences rather than from information about actual rates (Tankard & Paluck, 2016) . For example, we typically assess the popularity of an opinion by relying on cues like how familiar it feels or how many times we recall seeing it in the news or on social media. We’re less likely to use information obtained through an opinion poll. Indeed, media exposure is our primary source of information on many issues (Shehata & Strömbäck, 2021; Su et al., 2015) . Media is not, however, constructed to be representative of the actual distribution of beliefs and opinions that exist in the world. Instead, the news disproportionately shares extreme and uncommon views (e.g., Koehler, 2016) , and our social media algorithms often prioritize sensational content that grabs and maintains our engagement (e.g., Bucher & Helmond, 2018; Dujeancourt & Garz, 2023) . 

Media exposure can shift our perception of norms (Gunther et al., 2006; Paluck, 2009) , and disproportionate exposure to reports of minority attitudes and behaviors may make those attitudes and behaviors seem more common and acceptable than they actually are. Some of our work has found that the mere repetition of information increases perceptions that the information has consensus — an “illusory consensus” effect (Jalbert & Pillai, 2024) . Other researchers have found that repeated exposure to reports of immoral behaviors makes them seem more common and, in turn, more acceptable (Pillai et al., 2023) . These processes may help explain why people have a tendency to overestimate the extremity of views of those who do not share their political orientation or underestimate how many others actually share their own policy-related opinion (e.g., Levendusky & Malhotra, 2016; Yang et al., 2016) . For example, most people believe that climate change is a substantial problem that their government should address but substantially underestimate the percentage of people who agree with them (Andre et al., 2024; Sparkman et al., 2022) .

In addition to the effects of being exposed to information, other aspects of the messages may also lead people to (often incorrectly) believe those ideas have widespread consensus. Politicians frequently bake information about broad consensus into their messages. A recurring part of Trump’s rhetoric includes referring to the “many people” who say or believe the message he wants to promote. For example, in a press conference last Thursday, Trump (incorrectly) claimed that “They wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade and that’s Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, and everybody. Liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back in the states” (Montanaro, 2024) . As another example, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) argued on May 8, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.” In this case, Johnson was not only repeating false information (Swenson, 2024) but was also claiming that this was something widely known and accepted. Combined with the influences of disproportionate and repeated news coverage, these political messages can easily mislead people on which positions are widely held.

Weird-checking as a social norms intervention

A recent survey by Data for Progress asked US voters to judge how weird they found recent claims made and actions taken by members of the Republican party. Most voters found several of them — including claiming that Kamala Harris only recently became a Black person and supporting the monitoring of pregnant women to prevent them from traveling for reproductive healthcare — to be “very weird” (Springs, 2024) . When left unchecked, the disproportionate and repeated coverage of these behaviors may make them especially susceptible to falsely inflated perceptions of consensus. Without looking at this poll, people may not know that the majority of other people also find these behaviors to be abnormal. By weird-checking unpopular beliefs, including these, Democrats are helping communicate more accurate perceptions of the true state of consensus.

Communicating information around consensus is a powerful intervention, well-established by social psychologists to be effective in promoting belief correction and behavior change across a variety of domains. For example, communicating doctors’ consensus around COVID-19 vaccines can increase vaccination rates (Bartoš et al., 2022) , and sharing social norms around engaging in energy and water conservation habits can increase those behaviors (Goldstein et al., 2008; Nolan et al., 2008; Schultz et al., 2007) . Communicating consensus information can also be used to reduce undesirable behaviors like littering (Kallgren et al., 2000) and drinking and driving (Perkins et al., 2010) . And, more recently, sharing consensus information has been found to help reduce belief in misinformation (Ecker et al., 2023) .

Communication around consensus also does not have to be explicit to change our minds. In some of our work, we’ve investigated how false information shared online is evaluated when it appears with social truth queries: questions posed by another user drawing attention to whether information is true (e.g., “How do you know this is true?”, “Is there evidence for that?”, “Do other people believe that?”). We have consistently found that the presence of these truth queries reduces belief in and intent to share false information. These truth queries are thought to be effective in part because the mere act of asking a question disrupts assumptions that the information has consensus and changes how we process it (Jalbert et al., 2023) . Similarly, calling something weird may lead people to use a different frame than they normally would to guide how that information is interpreted and understood (see Starbird, 2023 , for a relevant discussion).

An additional note is that these efforts may be effective even when they don’t convince everyone that a particular attitude or behavior is weird. Because people have a strong motivation to affiliate and receive the approval of others (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004) , just knowing that others consider a sentiment weird may make someone less likely to publicly endorse or share it. 

We also want to note an important limitation to our discussion of weird-checking so far. We have been focused on the effects of calling attitudes and behaviors weird. However, politicians have also been referring to the people who promote these attitudes and engage in these behaviors as weird too. Doing so may lead people to reconsider those politicians in the same fashion — e.g., are these people reasonable? How similar are they to what people expect of someone who holds their position? How many others generally agree with their beliefs and values?

Why weird-checking may sometimes be better than fact-checking

Why might weird-checking be helping Democrats change the narrative in places where typical fact-checking efforts have been unsuccessful? In many situations, fact-checks can be effective in getting people to update their beliefs (Walter & Murphy, 2018) . However, fact-checking has its shortcomings. One particularly important one is that attitudes and the acceptability of behaviors can’t be fact-checked. You can’t fact-check, for example, whether someone should support the monitoring of pregnant women to restrict their travel. But you can weird-check this view.

In addition, the truth of a message is often nuanced and complicated, making it difficult to communicate and digest. Fact-checks ask us to focus on the specific details of an attitude held or action taken by one person. Weird-checking may allow us to bypass engaging these details (an often frustrating and not-so-fruitful task that distracts from the overarching takeaway) and instead do a more general gut check of whether the attitude or behavior is consistent with our values and norms and those our society endorses.

Why weird-checking works

Why does weird-checking work? Calling an attitude or behavior weird communicates information about social norms and consensus, factors that play a critical role in guiding our own beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Extreme and minority views are often overrepresented in the media, and repeated exposure to them may make them appear to be more common and acceptable than they actually are. Referring to an attitude or behavior as weird disrupts inflated perceptions of consensus, provides information about the views of others, and orients us to more carefully consider whether the attitude or behavior is consistent with societal values and expectations. You don’t have to use the word weird to get this effect. You could use a more traditional approach like sharing opinion poll information. Or you could try out another phrasing like unusual, strange, bizarre, or out-of-touch. But weird works.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Drew Gorenz, Michael Grass, Angela Harwood, and Rachel Moran-Prestridge for their thoughtful input and suggestions on this piece.

Illustration at top based on icons via The Noun Project .

• Andre, P., Boneva, T., Chopra, F., & Falk, A. (2024). Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action. Nature Climate Change , 14 (3), 253–259. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01925-3
• Bartoš, V., Bauer, M., Cahlíková, J., & Chytilová, J. (2022). Communicating doctors’ consensus persistently increases COVID-19 vaccinations. Nature . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04805-y
• Bucher, T., & Helmond, A. (2018). The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell, The SAGE Handbook of Social Media (pp. 233–253). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473984066.n14
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• Ecker, U. K., Sanderson, J. A., McIlhiney, P., Rowsell, J. J., Quekett, H. L., Brown, G. D., & Lewandowsky, S. (2023). Combining refutations and social norms increases belief change. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , 76 (6), 1275–1297. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218221111750
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• Gunther, A. C., Bolt, D., Borzekowski, D. L. G., Liebhart, J. L., & Dillard, J. P. (2006). Presumed influence on peer norms: How mass media indirectly affect adolescent smoking. Journal of Communication , 56 (1), 52–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00002.x
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• Springs, A. (2024, August 5). Voters Think Recent GOP Actions and Quotes Are Very Weird . Data For Progress. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/8/5/voters-think-recent-gop-actions-and-quotes-are-very-weird
• Starbird, K. (2023, December 6). Facts, frames, and (mis)interpretations: Understanding rumors as collective sensemaking. Center for an Informed Public . https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/12/06/rumors-collective-sensemaking-kate-starbird/
• Su, L. Y.-F., Akin, H., Brossard, D., Scheufele, D. A., & Xenos, M. A. (2015). Science news consumption patterns and their implications for public understanding of science. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly , 92 (3), 597–616. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699015586415
• Swenson, A. (2024, May 18). Noncitizen voting, already illegal in federal elections, becomes a centerpiece of 2024 GOP messaging . AP News. https://apnews.com/article/voting-immigrants-noncitizen-trump-republicans-2024-1c65429c152c2a10514b5156eacf9ca7
• Tankard, M. E., & Paluck, E. L. (2016). Norm perception as a vehicle for social change. Social Issues and Policy Review , 10 (1), 181–211. https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12022
• Walter, N., & Murphy, S. T. (2018). How to unring the bell: A meta-analytic approach to correction of misinformation. Communication Monographs , 85 (3), 423–441. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2018.1467564
• Yang, J., Rojas, H., Wojcieszak, M., Aalberg, T., Coen, S., Curran, J., Hayashi, K., Iyengar, S., Jones, P. K., Mazzoleni, G., Papathanassopoulos, S., Rhee, J. W., Rowe, D., Soroka, S., & Tiffen, R. (2016). Why are “others” so polarized? Perceived political polarization and media use in 10 countries. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , 21 (5), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12166

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Join the CIP, KNKX and KUOW for ‘Stand with the Facts: Protecting Election Integrity’ on September 11

Aug 6, 2024

You're invited to join KNKX, KUOW, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) for Stand with the Facts: Protecting Election Integrity with special guest, NPR correspondent Shannon Bond — September 11, 7:30 p.m. in Town Hall Seattle’s Great Hall. 

Rumors questioning the legality and legitimacy of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee

Jul 31, 2024

In this unprecedented moment of American electoral history, we will continue to see narratives that question the legality and legitimacy of a nomination process, even once some of those answers have been made clear legally and procedurally. 

At ICA, CIP postdoctoral scholar Yiwei Xu receives top paper and outstanding dissertation awards

Jul 23, 2024

CIP postdoctoral scholar Yiwei Xu with the International Communication Association's Information Systems Division Top Paper Award and the Annie Lang Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Disclaimer: Early release articles are not considered as final versions. Any changes will be reflected in the online version in the month the article is officially released.

Volume 30, Number 10—October 2024

One Health Investigation into Mpox and Pets, United States

Suggested citation for this article

Monkeypox virus (MPXV) is zoonotic and capable of infecting many mammal species. However, whether common companion animals are susceptible to MPXV infection is unclear. During July 2022–March 2023, we collected animal and environmental swab samples within homes of confirmed human mpox case-patients and tested for MPXV and human DNA by PCR. We also used ELISA for orthopoxvirus antibody detection. Overall, 12% (22/191) of animal and 25% (14/56) of environmental swab samples from 4 households, including samples from 4 dogs and 1 cat, were positive for MPXV DNA, but we did not detect viable MPXV or orthopoxvirus antibodies. Among MPXV PCR-positive swab samples, 82% from animals and 93% the environment amplified human DNA with a statistically significant correlation in observed cycle threshold values. Our findings demonstrate likely DNA contamination from the human mpox cases. Despite the high likelihood for exposure, however, we found no indications that companion animals were infected with MPXV.

Before 2022, the primary mode for monkeypox virus (MPXV) transmission was known to be zoonotic, and only limited human-to-human transmission was documented ( 1 , 2 ). Human MPXV infections resulting in mpox disease were hypothesized to be the result of direct or potentially indirect contact with infected wild mammals in Central and Western Africa ( 3 , 4 ). Our understanding of the potential for human-to-human spread of MPXV considerably broadened in the spring of 2022 ( 5 , 6 ). During that time, variant of clade II MPXV (clade IIb) was found in to be transmitted via direct contact among human populations and spreading primarily through sexual networks outside of mpox endemic regions ( 5 , 6 ).

Given the zoonotic origin and reported broad host-range of MPXV, efforts to understand and limit potential human-to-animal transmission are ongoing ( 4 , 7 ). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides guidance that persons with mpox stop or avoid contact with animals and that animals should be kept away from potentially infectious lesion material, objects, or surfaces ( 8 ). Mpox patients are generally urged by public health agencies to isolate at home unless hospitalization is clinically necessary ( 9 , 10 ). A person with mpox is considered infectious throughout their illness and until lesions have fully healed with new skin underneath; therefore, public health officials recommend that mpox patients isolating at home take proper infection control measures to prevent spread of infectious particles throughout the home ( 11 – 13 ). Unless infected persons take measures to completely isolate or reduce transmission potential, companion animals in close contact with mpox patients and their environments could be at higher risk for MPXV exposure than other mammal species, warranting special concern and investigation.

As of July 2024, no cases of MPXV infection or mpox disease had been confirmed in common domestic animals, such as dogs and cats, during the current global outbreak or any past outbreaks. One study in July 2022 described a 4-year-old dog in France that had been living and co-sleeping with 2 mpox case-patients ( 14 ). In that study, MPXV DNA was identified in swab samples from the dog’s skin and surface of mucosal lesions and in anal and oral swab samples ( 14 ). However, follow-up investigations suggested that the animal was not infected with MPXV ( 15 ). A similar case was documented in Brazil in August 2022, when a 5-month-old dog had lesions that were MPXV-positive by quantitative PCR ( 16 ). Whether viral DNA detection was a result of MPXV infection in those animals or the result of environmental contamination due to close contact with infected humans is unclear. We conducted a One Health investigation in the United States to assess the susceptibility of companion animals to mpox and the risk for reverse-zoonotic transmission within households.

Methods and Materials

Study population.

The CDC Muti-National Mpox Response’s One Health Team worked in collaboration with state and local jurisdictions to investigate the susceptibility of companion animals to MPXV infection. As part of that effort, CDC and state public health investigators collected blood samples from companion animals and swab specimens from companion animals and animal-associated objects. CDC tested swab and serum specimens via real-time PCR, orthopoxvirus (OPXV) serology, and viral culture. All animals tested were companion animals in a residence of a person with probable or confirmed mpox while the person was infectious. Animal sampling occurred within 21 days of any direct contact with the ill person before the person recovered ( Table 1 ).

During July 2022–March 2023, we conducted sample collection in the District of Columbia, Virginia, Minnesota, and Tennessee, USA. After the initial sampling timepoint, we attempted follow-up sampling from all households 3–4 months later to collect animal serum samples and assess postexposure or postinfection immune responses.

Questionnaire and Consent

State and local public health personnel from the District of Columbia, Virginia, Minnesota, and Tennessee assisted with the study by interviewing mpox cases in their jurisdictions and requesting their voluntary participation in the study. After a person gave verbal consent to participate, they were provided with a survey questionnaire and consent forms. The questionnaire ascertained details and a timeline of the human case, the animal’s health condition, general household information, types of contact between the person with mpox and the animal or animals in the household, and information about wild or domestic animals in and around the household. This project was reviewed by CDC clearance, cleared for human subjects, and determined to be nonresearch public health surveillance that did not require submission to the CDC institutional review board (project no. 0900f3eb81f79d72).

Swab Sample Collection

We performed all animal handling and sampling procedures in accordance with the approved CDC Institutional Animal Care Use Committee protocol (no. DOTMULX3183), in collaboration with state public health agencies, and with written consent of the animal’s owner. We collected a standardized set of polyester swab (Puritan, https://www.puritanmedproducts.com ) samples from the animal’s dorsum fur, ventral abdomen, oral cavity, and anorectal area under supervision of the owner. We sampled animal lesions, if present. We also collected animal-associated environmental (AAE) specimens from objects and surfaces often used by the animal.

Sample Processing and PCR

We processed swab samples by using the swab extraction tube system (SETS; Roche, https://www.roche.com ) with 400 μL of phosphate-buffered saline; after DNA extraction, we tested all samples for MPXV DNA by real-time PCR using an MPXV clade II–specific assay ( 17 ). In addition, we tested samples for human DNA by using the RNase-P PCR assay, which is used as an endogenous control when testing human specimens ( 18 ). We calculated Pearson correlation coefficients to assess the relationship between cycle threshold (Ct) values of MPXV clade II PCR–positive (Ct values < 37) and RNase-P reactive (Ct values <40) samples.

Viral Culture

We tested all PCR-positive swab samples for viable virus via cell culture by adding an aliquot of swab eluate to BSC-40 cell monolayers in T-25 flasks. We used an inoculation volume of 50 μL + 25 μL, depending on available eluate volume. We incubated flasks at 35.5°C in an atmosphere of 6% CO 2 in Roswell Park Memorial Institute medium ( 19 ). We incubated and observed flasks < 14 days or until ≈100% of monolayer showed cytopathic effect, following methods and media supplements described previously ( 11 ). To control the overgrowth of bacteria or fungi in T-25 flasks, we added penicillin/streptomycin, amphotericin B, and gentamicin to the cell culture medium. If we detected any bacterial or fungal contamination, we performed 4 cycles of medium replacement to wash the monolayers and repeated this process as needed to prevent overgrowth.

Blood Collection and Serologic Testing

We attempted blood collection from all cooperative animals for which the owner provided consent. We collected < 3 mL of blood from 20/34 animals during initial sampling and 21/25 animals during follow-up sampling. We cleaned the external venipuncture site with 90% ethanol and used a syringe or vacutainer needle for blood collection. For dogs and 1 rabbit, we collected blood via the cephalic or lateral saphenous veins. For cats, we collected blood via the jugular or medial saphenous veins. We stored and transported blood tubes at 4°C–20°C before centrifugation, after which we transferred serum into 2-mL cryotubes and stored at temperatures of at least –20°C until laboratory testing. We conducted a modified ELISA on all serum samples to determine presence of OPXV IgG antibodies, as previously described ( 20 , 21 ). We tested serum samples at a dilution of 1:100 by using microtiter plates coated with purified vaccinia virus (Dryvax strain) and using the A/G protein as the secondary antibody at a 1:10,000 concentration and developed plates for 25 minutes.

Data Analysis

When referring to animal swab samples, we defined prevalence as the proportion of total swabs collected from each animal from which we detected either MPXV DNA or RNase-P (RNP) by PCR. When referring to AAE samples, we defined prevalence as the proportion of total swabs collected from the AAE samples within that animal’s household that were MPXV-positive or RNP-positive. We also referred to detection of RNase-P via PCR as presence of human DNA.

For each animal, we calculated the duration of exposure, defined as cumulative number of days before sampling that an infectious owner had direct contact with the animal, including durations where direct contact was not reported but the animal was still sharing a common space with a person with mpox. Duration of exposure represented the total period that infectious lesion material (crusts or exudates) or other infectious particles were potentially shed or transferred within the home, to which the animal potentially had contact, either directly or via fomites.

We investigated factors reported in questionnaires that could affect animal MPXV exposure ( Table 1 ). Those factors included whether the owner was symptomatic during time of sampling (coded SXDS); the degree of animal outdoor activity (coded AOA), which we stratified by none (no outdoor activity), walks (periodic or frequent supervised walks outside), and yard (allowed in yard or outside unsupervised frequently or for prolonged periods); co-sleeping with the animal while the owner was infectious (coded CSI); and a score comprised of the sum of all reported interaction types between animals and humans that involved direct contact (coded DIS), which included cuddling, hugging, petting, kissing, co-sleeping, sharing food, and grooming ( Table 1 ).

We compared bivariate correlation coefficients among variables compiled from questionnaire data or diagnostic testing. We used SPSS Statistics 27 (IBM, https://www.ibm.com ) to compute Pearson correlation coefficients. We performed 2-tailed tests of significance and considered p values of < 0.05 or < 0.01 statistically significant, as applicable.

Overall, we sampled 34 individual companion animals from 21 households: 24 domestic dogs, 9 domestic cats, and 1 domestic rabbit ( Table 2 ). The age of the animals ranged from 4 months to 16 years; 22 were male and 12 were female. All but 1 household had a single human mpox case; the other household had 2 cases. We collected a total of 191 swab specimens from animals and 56 AAE specimens. If excess blood was available, we opportunistically tested select blood specimens via PCR, including 10 whole blood specimens preserved in EDTA and 1 blood clot. At examination, we observed skin lesions in 6 dogs and 1 cat, and lesion features and locations varied.

PCR for Animal Samples

Samples collected from 5 individual animals (4 dogs, 1 cat) from 4 households were MPXV-positive; 2 of the dogs shared a household. Total animal swab MPXV positivity was 12% (22/191); 21 MPXV-positive swabs were from dogs, and 1 was from a cat ( Table 3 ). All MPXV-positive animals also had > 1 sample with an RNP-positive test result. Ct values of MPXV-positive samples were 25.2–36.7 (mean 34.5). Results of specific sample types collected were 29% (4/14) for skin lesions, 16% (6/37) for ventral skin or fur, 12% (4/33) for dorsal fur, 11% (4/35) for periocular area, 8% (3/36) for anorectal area, and 3% (1/36) for oral.

Among animal MPXV-positive specimens, 82% were RNP-positive, whereas 25% of the MPXV DNA–negative specimens were RNP-positive ( Table 3 ). Ct values of MPXV-positive specimens that were RNP-positive positively correlated (p<0.01). In animal specimens, 18% (4/22) were MPXV-positive and RNP-negative, and positive Ct values (range 35.3–36.1) were near the upper limit of detection (Ct 37) for the assay. We did not detect MPXV DNA in any of the blood specimens tested via MPXV PCR. In addition, MPXV DNA prevalence in animal samples alone and when combined with AAE specimens significantly correlated with RNP prevalence in those same samples (p<0.05).

We collected AAE specimens from 20/21 households, predominately from animal beds or bedding, toys, and food and water dishes. Among households, 29% (6/21) were positive for MPXV DNA, as were 25% (14/56) of collected specimens, 93% (13/14) of which were positive for MPXV and RNP ( Table 3 ). In those same samples, AAE MPXV DNA prevalence positively correlated with human DNA prevalence (p<0.05). Of the 4 households with MPXV-positive animal swab specimens, all had MPXV-positive AAE swabs with Ct values of 29.9–35.9 (mean 32.8). For AAE specimens that were MPXV- and RNP-positive, the MPXV and RNase-P Ct values were significantly correlated (p<0.01). Of all AAE specimens, 66% (37/56) were RNP-positive, of which 82% (9/11) of specimens with Ct values <37 were in the 4 households with MPXV-positive AAE and animal swab samples.

Viral Culture and Serology

We attempted viral culture from all specimens with Ct values < 36 (n = 31), and all were negative with no signs of cytopathic effect. Three specimens from 2 dogs had bacterial contamination causing destruction of monolayer by day 6 or 7 postinfection, despite mitigating steps or retesting, and the harvested culture media tested negative by MPXV-specific PCR. In addition, all initial (n = 20) and follow-up (n = 22) serum specimens collected were ELISA-negative, and we detected no OPXV IgG. For 1 dog that had samples with the lowest MPXV Ct values, we collected 2 follow-up samples 2 months apart. Of the 5 animals that had MPXV-positive swab specimens, 3 did not have blood sampled at the initial timepoint due to noncompliance or aggression, and 3 were not available at the postexposure sampling timepoint.

Questionnaire Analysis

In total, 32% (11/34) of animals had preexisting health issues and 5 animals had preexisting skin lesions. In addition to the 5 animals with skin lesions that developed before owner symptom onset (all sampled), 2 additional animals had lesions that developed after owner symptom onset. We observed and sampled those lesions during the initial sampling visit, and 1 animal had skin and fur, periocular, and anorectal specimens that were PCR-positive for MPXV DNA, but we did not detect MPXV DNA from the lesion specimen, and serology results also were negative.

In total, 33% (7/21) of households reported no contact change with their animals. Reported types of changes in animal interactions included reducing frequency of interactions (9/21), stopping interactions (8/21), use of PPE during interactions (6/21), and relocating or isolating the animal (4/21); 1 household reported relegating animal care to uninfected persons outside the household. However, all but 1 household reported > 1 type of direct contact activity with each animal after the MPXV-positive human in the household had symptoms develop ( Table 1 ).

Households comprised apartments (n = 11) or single-family homes (n = 10), and approximate size range was 500–3,500 ft 2 ( Table 1 ). We observed a significant negative correlation between household size and prevalence of either MPXV (p<0.05) or human DNA (p<0.01) in animal samples and human DNA prevalence in environmental samples (p<0.01). Apart from human DNA prevalence, household size, and environmental MPXV prevalence, we observed no other statistically significant relationships for other variables potentially influencing prevalence of MPXV DNA in animal samples.

CDC advises that persons with mpox should avoid contact with animals, including pets, until lesions have fully healed to prevent potential virus spillback. That recommendation is because of uncertainty regarding susceptibility of companion animals to MPXV ( 9 ). If MPXV-infected persons cannot avoid contact with pets within the household, practicing appropriate infection control will prevent further exposure potential. In most households we visited, recommended quarantine and infection control procedures were not consistently followed.

Despite MPXV-positive swab specimens detected on the skin or fur of dogs and cats and in associated environmental samples, no dogs or cats with live virus or antibodies detected have been reported globally. In 2 cases outside of the United States in which MPXV DNA was detected in dogs ( 14 , 16 ), apart from apparent skin lesions, no other signs of infection were reported in the animals, including virus cultured from samples or OPXV antibodies detected by serology after additional investigation ( 15 ).

In our household study, skin lesions in 7 animals were the only observable clinical features that were potentially consistent with mpox disease. However, 5 animals exhibited lesions before owner symptom onset, and the 2 animals with skin lesions that were observed after owner symptom onset were negative for MPXV by PCR. Only 1 animal had MPXV-positive lesions sampled, a dog with lesion swab samples collected from a grouping of 3 large lesions on its rear leg, and the average Ct value of samples was 25.2. After further testing to consider potential DNA contamination from the owner, that sample also had the lowest average RNase-P Ct value (29.3) of all samples tested. In addition, that dog’s lesions were reported to have formed before symptom onset in the owner, culture attempts from that and all other samples were negative, and OPXV antibodies were not detected during any timepoint tested. Therefore, after reviewing all the data, we did not consider this animal a confirmed mpox case.

All animals with MPXV-positive samples in this study also had RNP-positive specimens collected, indicating the presence of human DNA. The statistically significant correlation of MPXV- and RNP-positive samples, MPXV PCR results showing high Ct values indicating low viral DNA loads, and the lack of viable virus or antibodies in the collected samples strongly suggest that observed lesions or scabs in these animals were not the result of MPXV infection. In addition, from our knowledge of MPXV pathology, an MPXV lesion would most likely produce high viral loads and at levels higher than for other sample types ( 22 ).

As reported in other household environmental sampling studies, MPXV DNA can be widely detected in indoor or household settings ( 11 , 12 , 23 – 25 ). In this study, we found that households with smaller shared spaces were significantly correlated with both MPXV and human DNA prevalence, suggesting that the risk for MPXV exposure could be higher in smaller living quarters. Given the capability of MPXV DNA to disseminate within the household of a person with mpox, and after consideration of the PCR results detailed here, persons with mpox, not the companion animals, likely were the source of the MPXV DNA we detected in the household.

The potential for contamination from either direct contact with a person with mpox or indirect exposure to materials containing MPXV DNA should be considered when interpreting results of PCR testing from companion animals. In addition, case definitions should consider potential extraneous contamination and require more than a PCR-positive result from an animal to be considered a confirmed animal mpox case ( 26 ). Contamination should also be considered as a reason for a positive PCR result and false positive results in humans with nonspecific lesions who have potentially had contact with an mpox case-patient.

MPXV infection in companion animals, if they are suitable hosts, is uncharacterized; clinical signs, viral shedding, and duration of infectious period are unknown. Thus, although unlikely, given the limits of our sampling design, it is possible that an infected animal escaped detection in our study. However, the overall PCR and serologic evidence best fits the hypothesis that the MPXV DNA detected in animal samples submitted for PCR testing is a result of DNA contamination from the infected human within the household.

More work is needed to determine the susceptibility of companion animals to clade-IIb MPXV. Thus, CDC still recommends that companion animal owners with mpox limit their interactions with their pets while infectious, particularly if they are sharing smaller living spaces. That precautionary measure is recommended until more information is available about the susceptibility of common mammalian companion animal species to mpox.

In conclusion, no strong evidence yet exists to suggest that common companion animals, such as dogs or cats, are susceptible to infection with clade IIb MPXV. Given high likelihood for exposure among most of these animals, the paucity of evidence indicating infection might indicate resistance to infection. Nonetheless, to prevent further viral spread and potential evolution and establishment of new endemic areas, during public health emergencies caused by emerging zoonotic diseases, responders should apply a One Health approach to investigate potential spillback of human infections to animals, including pets.

Mr. Morgan is a biologist in the Poxvirus and Rabies Branch, Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His research interests include the virus-host interactions of orthopoxviruses and lyssaviruses in the environment.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Epidemiology, Laboratory and Testing, and STLT (State, Tribal, Local, or Territorial) Task Forces of the CDC 2022 Multinational Mpox Response and the CDC Poxvirus and Rabies Branch, Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. We also acknowledge additional persons and entities who assisted with this study, including the Minnesota Department of Health, including Patrice Vandelinde, Victoria Lappi, and Anna Strain; the Virginia Department of Health, including Kenneth Gordon, Christina Chommanard, Luisa Angel Cortes, Clarissa Bonnefond, Lisa Engle, and Cynthia Rieken; the Tennessee Department of Health and Agriculture, including Jane Yackley, Dilani Goonewardene, and Whitnie Smartt; and DC Department of Health, including Sarah Gillani, Will Still, and Karla Miletti. In addition, we acknowledge, Casey Barton-Behravesh, Yoshinori Nakazawa, Modupe Osinubi, Ashutosh Wadhwa, and Ariel Caudle for their assistance.

All funding for this study was provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2022 Multinational Mpox Response (CDC Mpox Response). The CDC Mpox Response provided technical review and oversight of this manuscript before publication. This study and report were also supported in part by an appointment to the Applied Epidemiology Fellowship Program, administered by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (cooperative agreement no. 1NU38OT000297-03-00).

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• Table 1 . Summary of variables coded from household and questionnaire data used in a One Health investigation into mpox and pets, United States
• Table 2 . Animal and environment sampling and diagnostic testing data from a One Health investigation into mpox and pets, United States
• Table 3 . PCR results of for monkeypox virus clade II and RNase-P DNA assays from swab samples of companion animals and animal-associated objects and surfaces during a One Health investigation into mpox...

Suggested citation for this article : Morgan CN, Wendling NM, Baird N, Kling C, Lopez L, Navarra T, et al. One Health investigation into mpox and pets, United States. Emerg Infect Dis. 2024 Oct [ date cited ]. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid3010.240632

DOI: 10.3201/eid3010.240632

Original Publication Date: August 14, 2024

Table of Contents – Volume 30, Number 10—October 2024

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Chemical Communications

Designed additive suppresses interpenetration in irmof-10 †.

* Corresponding authors

a Department of Chemistry, University of Michigan, 930 North University Avenue, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA E-mail: [email protected]

b Macromolecular Science and Engineering Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

IRMOF-10, derived from biphenyl-4,4′-dicarboxylic acid and zinc, is a prototype for an open cubic structure prone to interpenetration. Interpenetration can compromise MOF pore volume and surface area which drives the need to develop strategies to synthesize non-interpenetrated MOFs. In this work, an additive design strategy was employed to suppress interpenetration of IRMOF-10. The presence of the additive during traditional solvothermal synthesis yielded an activated material with the highest surface area reported to date and enabled the determination of the single crystal structure. In situ monitoring of the nucleation of crystals under polarized light provided insights into the mechanism behind interpenetration in the IRMOF-9/10 system. This work provides a roadmap to suppress interpenetration more generically in other MOFs and achieve improved surface areas and pore volumes for this prominent class of porous sorbents.

• This article is part of the themed collection: ChemComm 60th Anniversary Collection

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Designed additive suppresses interpenetration in IRMOF-10

C. A. Carey, L. M. Foroughi and A. J. Matzger, Chem. Commun. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4CC03138E

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