APA vs Vancouver vs IEEE — Which Citation Style Should You Use?

Picking the right citation style depends on your discipline and your institution's guidelines. Here is a quick side-by-side.

APA (7th edition)

• Used by: Psychology, education, social sciences, management
• In-text: (Sharma, 2024) or Sharma (2024)
• References list: Alphabetical by author surname
• Great for: Any thesis where readers care about who said something when

Vancouver

• Used by: Medical, nursing, health sciences
• In-text: [1], [2, 3] — a running number
• References list: In the order cited
• Great for: Clinical papers where citation density is high

IEEE

• Used by: Engineering, computer science, electronics
• In-text: [1] — same numbered style as Vancouver, but formatting rules differ
• References list: In the order cited; author initials come before surname
• Great for: Technical papers, conference papers, and AKTU/JNTU/VTU/BPUT B.Tech/M.Tech theses

Quick decision tree

1. Nursing / medical? → Vancouver.
2. Engineering / CS? → IEEE.
3. Management / social sciences / education / arts? → APA.
4. Law? → Bluebook (not covered above; ask your supervisor).

Common mistakes we correct

• Mixing styles within the same document
• APA: forgetting the DOI or the retrieval date for web sources
• Vancouver: using author-year in-text after starting with numbers
• IEEE: using "et al." for fewer than 6 authors

If you're unsure, our formatting service can convert an entire draft from one style to another with zero manual retyping — we use structured tools plus a manual quality pass.