3 October 2026 · 8 min read
Almost every thesis and many assignments in Nepal lean on the same group of sources: census data, the Economic Survey, Nepal Rastra Bank reports, periodic plans, Acts and Nepali-language books. Standard APA guides barely mention any of them, so students improvise and the reference list ends up inconsistent. This guide shows how APA 7 handles each type. The examples below are format examples: titles and years illustrate the pattern and should always be checked against the actual document you used.
Government and institutional reports usually have no individual author named on the cover. In APA 7, the organisation becomes the author, written in full. When the publisher is the same organisation as the author, the publisher is omitted. If the report was downloaded, the URL goes at the end.
Use the official English name as printed on the document. Write the full name in the reference list. In the text, you may introduce an abbreviation once and use it afterwards: first citation (National Statistics Office [NSO], 2023), then (NSO, 2023).
The ellipsis in the URLs above stands for the address of the specific PDF you used. Always give the direct document link where possible, not the homepage of the ministry or bank, because a reader should be able to find exactly what you cited.
Many Nepali documents are dated in Bikram Sambat, and fiscal-year reports often show both calendars. APA does not have a rule written for BS, so the clearest practice, and the one most supervisors accept, is to give the Gregorian year in the reference and in-text citation for consistency with the rest of your list. Where the document gives only a BS date, convert it and, if your supervisor prefers, show the original in brackets: (2080 BS/2023).
Fiscal years are the trickier case. A report for fiscal year 2080/81 BS covers mid-July 2023 to mid-July 2024. Keep the fiscal year in the title exactly as the document shows it — 2023/24 or 2080/81 — and use the actual publication year as the date. Whatever you choose, be consistent across the whole reference list; mixed calendars are one of the most common marks lost in Nepali theses.
If you quote a Nepali-language source in an English assignment, you are presenting your own translation. Translate the passage into English, cite the original source with a page number, and many supervisors also like a note that the translation is yours: (Sharma, 2020, p. 45, author's translation). Do not put the Nepali text in quotation marks and then cite an English title that does not exist.
For paraphrase, the usual rule applies: write the idea in your own English words and cite the original. The fact that you translated it does not make the idea yours, which is a point we cover in more detail in our guide to translated text and plagiarism.
In-text citations follow the same author-date pattern as any other source. A narrative citation names the organisation in the sentence: according to the Ministry of Finance (2024), remittance inflows... A parenthetical citation puts it in brackets at the end: ...rose sharply over the period (Ministry of Finance, 2024). For a specific figure or table, add the page or table number so a reader can verify it: (NSO, 2023, p. 37) or (Nepal Rastra Bank, 2024, Table 4).
Statistics are where this matters most. Census figures, inflation rates and remittance totals are exactly what examiners check, and a figure with no page reference is hard to verify. Citing the page also protects you if two editions of a report give slightly different numbers.
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Referencing mistakes are the most common cause of avoidable similarity matches. If you want your reference list and citations checked along with a plagiarism report, send your draft on WhatsApp and we will tell you what needs fixing.
Tell us what you need checked and when it is due. Your document is checked without being stored in any student-paper repository, so the check never counts against your real submission. The reports come back with what each match means, not just a percentage.