Heriot-Watt University Dubai

Reference managers like Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote are widely used to keep citation formatting consistent across a long document, especially once a thesis runs to several dozen sources across multiple chapters written weeks apart. They reduce repetitive formatting work, but they don't replace understanding the target style — auto-generated citations still need a final manual check, particularly for edge cases like sources with no listed author, multiple editions, or online-only material.

Whichever style your program requires, the underlying discipline — APA, IEEE, Harvard, Vancouver or another — is usually the more reliable clue than the country a university is based in.

Because Heriot-Watt University Dubai sets its own requirements — and only Heriot-Watt University Dubai can tell you what those are — our role is to work carefully within whatever you provide. In practice, that means asking for your program handbook, formatting guide or citation requirements up front, and building your draft around those documents plus any direction your supervisor has already given, which is a workable approach across universities generally, not something specific to any one school.

Formatting requirements — margins, line spacing, font, pagination, and whether a thesis is submitted electronically, in print, or both — vary considerably between institutions, and often between programs at the same institution. There is no single universal standard, even though many programs converge on broadly similar defaults (1-inch margins, double or 1.5 line spacing, a numbered contents page).

This page describes general academic norms, not a specific formatting requirement — your own university's thesis handbook or formatting guide is the authoritative source, and it should always take precedence over anything general written here.