Every citation exists in two places: the full entry in your reference list, and the short marker inside the sentence pointing to it. Nepali departments set different styles for different faculties, and the in-text rules are where they diverge most.
Enter the author, year and page and this tool produces the marker for your style, with worked examples showing exactly where it sits in a sentence and how the punctuation falls around it.
Management, education and social science coursework generally uses APA — author and date. Medicine, nursing and public health use Vancouver, which cites a reference number instead. Engineering and IT use IEEE, also numbered. English and humanities use MLA, which gives author and page but no year.
That means the in-text marker for the same source looks entirely different depending on your programme: (Shrestha, 2020) in APA, (Shrestha 45) in MLA, and [1] in both Vancouver and IEEE. Confirm the style with your department before you start writing rather than converting a finished draft.
Parenthetical form puts everything in brackets at the end: retention improved after the intervention (Shrestha, 2020). Narrative form makes the author the subject of your sentence: Shrestha (2020) found that retention improved.
Alternating between them is what makes a literature review readable. Narrative citations foreground who made a claim, which you need when comparing positions; parenthetical citations keep attention on the finding. A chapter written entirely in one form reads as a list rather than a discussion.
Vancouver and IEEE do not cite by author at all. The marker is the number your reference list assigns — the first source you cite is [1], and it stays [1] every time you return to it, however many pages later.
This has a consequence students discover painfully: you cannot alphabetise a numbered reference list. Doing so renumbers every entry and silently breaks every marker in the document. Vancouver also varies on whether the number appears in brackets or as a superscript, so follow your department's stated format.
Three or more authors shorten to the first surname plus et al. from the first citation onward in current APA and MLA. The full stop belongs on the "al", since it abbreviates et alia. Where an institution is the author — CBS, NRB, a ministry — write the full name first with the abbreviation in brackets, then use the abbreviation.
Punctuation placement is the other frequent slip: the sentence's full stop comes after the closing bracket, not before it. And every marker in your text needs a matching entry in the list, with no entry left uncited — a mismatch is among the quickest things for a supervisor to spot.
APA for management, education and social science; Vancouver for medicine and nursing; IEEE for engineering and IT; MLA for English and humanities. Confirm with your department.
The in-text marker is the short pointer inside your sentence; the reference entry is the full source detail at the end. Each needs the other.
No. Those styles number sources in citation order, so alphabetising renumbers everything and breaks every in-text marker.
Give the full institution name with the abbreviation in brackets on first use — (Central Bureau of Statistics [CBS], 2021) — then the abbreviation afterwards.
After the closing bracket, not before it. The citation belongs inside the sentence it supports.