What Needs a Citation? Common Knowledge Explained for Nepali Students

3 October 2026 · 7 min read

Students in Nepal are told to cite their sources, but rarely told where the line actually sits. Do you need a citation for the fact that Nepal is a federal republic? For a population figure? For the definition of inflation? Getting this wrong goes both ways: under-citing produces uncited matches in your similarity report, and over-citing clutters your writing with references to obvious facts.

This guide sets out a practical test, with examples from the kinds of assignments Nepali students actually write.

What common knowledge means

Common knowledge is information your intended reader already knows, or could confirm easily from many general sources, and which is not disputed. You do not need to cite it, because it does not belong to any particular author.

Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal.
Nepal shares borders with India and China.
Nepal became a federal democratic republic after the monarchy was abolished.
Mount Everest lies on the Nepal–China border.
Nepali is written in the Devanagari script.

None of these needs a reference in an assignment. Notice what they have in common: they are general, widely known, stable over time, and nobody would argue about them.

What always needs a citation

The moment information becomes specific, measured, recent or arguable, it needs a source. In Nepali coursework, the most common uncited items are numbers.

Statistics: population, literacy rates, poverty figures, unemployment, tourist arrivals, GDP growth.
Economic figures such as remittance as a share of GDP, inflation rates or interest rates — cite the specific publication and year.
Dates and details beyond the basic outline of an event, such as exact figures from a disaster or an election.
Any claim that someone could reasonably dispute, including claims about causes and effects.
Direct wording from any source, even a single distinctive phrase.
Ideas, models and frameworks that belong to a particular author or organisation.

A useful rule: if you looked it up, cite where you found it. You may know roughly that remittance is a large part of Nepal's economy — that general point can stand — but the moment you write a specific percentage, the reader needs to know which report and which year it came from, because the figure changes and different sources give different numbers.

Common knowledge depends on your reader

What counts as common knowledge changes with the audience. In a thesis for a management department, the basic idea of supply and demand needs no citation. In an essay for a general audience, it might. In an MBBS or nursing assignment, standard anatomical facts are common knowledge among your readers; a specific clinical guideline or dosage recommendation is not, and must be cited to its source.

Disciplinary common knowledge also has limits. A well-known theory — Maslow's hierarchy, Porter's five forces, Herzberg's two-factor theory — is familiar to every management student, but it still belongs to its author. Name the theory and cite the original or a standard textbook the first time you use it. Familiarity does not transfer ownership.

Definitions, laws and your own data

Definitions cause more similarity matches than almost anything else, because students paste textbook definitions word for word. A definition copied exactly needs quotation marks and a citation. Better still, define the term briefly in your own words and cite the source you learned it from.

For laws and official documents — an Act, a constitutional provision, a directive from a regulator — cite the document itself, and quote exact legal wording rather than paraphrasing it, since paraphrase can change the legal meaning.

Your own data does not need an external citation. Survey results you collected, interviews you conducted and observations from your internship are yours; explain in your methodology how you gathered them and refer to your own tables and appendices. What does need citing is any instrument you adapted — a questionnaire scale taken from published research, for example.

Worked examples from Nepali assignments

Seeing the test applied to real sentences helps. Here are sentences of the kind that appear in BBA, BBS and MBS assignments, with the decision for each:

Tourism is an important sector of Nepal's economy. No citation needed as a general statement — but the next sentence giving arrival numbers or revenue does.
Nepal adopted a federal structure with seven provinces. Common knowledge for a Nepali audience; no citation.
Commercial banks in Nepal must meet minimum capital requirements set by the central bank. The general point is widely known, but the specific requirement and the year it applied need the regulator's directive as a source.
Hydropower has large potential in Nepal because of its rivers. General and widely stated; an estimate of that potential in megawatts needs a source.
Remittance has reduced poverty in Nepal. This is a causal claim that researchers debate — cite the studies that support it.

The pattern is consistent. The broad statement that sets up a paragraph is often common knowledge; the specific detail that gives it weight almost never is. Writers who get this right usually cite the second sentence of a paragraph, not the first.

When in doubt, cite

If you cannot decide, cite. An unnecessary citation costs you a line in the reference list; a missing one can cost you a referral. The test that works in practice is to ask three questions:

Would my reader already know this without looking it up?
Could I find it stated the same way in many general sources?
Is it free of specific numbers, dates or claims someone might dispute?

If the answer to all three is yes, it is common knowledge. If any answer is no, cite it. And remember that citing does not cover copying: a cited sentence pasted word for word without quotation marks will still be flagged in a similarity report and still counts as poor practice.

Not sure if your work has plagiarism? Don't worry. Send it to us.

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.

Plagiarism report — The full similarity report on your assignment, proposal or chapter: every matched source listed, every flagged passage marked, and a plain read of which matches matter and which are your reference list doing its job.
AI report — The AI writing indicator read separately from similarity, because the two scores behave differently. If the flag looks like a detector artefact on work you wrote yourself, we tell you so, and what evidence answers it.
Thesis report — Similarity and AI reports for a full thesis or dissertation, run chapter by chapter so a problem in the literature review is found while you can still fix it, with each flagged passage explained for your supervisor.