How to cite a thesis in Vancouver
A master's or doctoral thesis submitted to a university. Numbered style used across biomedical journals.
Quick answer
To cite a thesis in Vancouver, include the author(s), year, title, and container or publisher details. A concrete example is below.
Example
1. Jumper J. Deep learning approaches to protein structure prediction [PhD thesis]. University of Chicago; 2017.
This example is rendered with the official CSL definition for Vancouver. For the exact style required by your journal, paste your references into DEEPNOTIS and pick that style from the dropdown — the app covers 2,800+ variants.
What you need
For a thesis, Vancouver expects these fields at minimum:
- Author
- Year
- Thesis title
- Degree type (PhD, Master's…)
- Institution
- URL or database if online
Common mistakes
- Writing out author first names. Vancouver uses initials without periods ('Smith J').
- Italicizing the journal name. Vancouver uses Index Medicus abbreviation without italics.
- Forgetting the DOI. When a DOI exists, most styles now require it (usually as a full https://doi.org/… URL).
- Inconsistent capitalization. APA uses sentence case for titles; MLA and Chicago use title case. Mixing them is the single most common style error.
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Last updated: 5 May 2026