Indiana scholars use IU ScholarWorks to host a wide range of their scholarly output: manuscripts, dissertations, open educational materials, conference slides and transcripts, event programs, and much more. Some of this material is unique to the repository, but some exists in different forms elsewhere on the web, such as a journal’s website or a conference’s YouTube channel. As with any citation, when referencing works in an institutional repository it’s important to cite that work as you accessed it—in this case, as archived material.
This may seem obvious, but in practice it can be more complicated if one doesn’t know how to read the deposit page. On IUScholarWorks an item’s page may have include a subheading for “Citation” or a DOI link, but these will generally point to another, external, version of the work and that may differ in significant ways. If the version you read and referenced is the repository version, you should use the repository record to construct your own citation and make use of it’s unique permanent URL.
In this blog post, we’ll construct citations in three popular styles for two document examples:
- A preprint of a scholarly article.
- A doctoral dissertation.
Style guides may have different guidelines for other document types such as presentations and government publications, but if you can find the appropriate template, this post will still assist you in finding the necessary details.
Finding and Reading Citation Details on IUSW
Below is a screenshot of the preprint article that we’ll use to construct our citations. You can see the full deposit page here.
In this screenshot, you can find:
- The title of the work.
- The author(s)/creator(s) of the work.
- The creation date.
- The permanent URL for the work.
You will also need to discern the type of work represented in the original document: whether it is a preprint, a dissertation, a presentation, etc. This will matter for all three citation styles.
APA
In APA 7th edition, citing a work archived in an institutional repository will follow the pattern for a preprint article.
Author(s). (Year). Title. Repository name. URL
As an archived item, the work isn’t considered a part of a larger work (such as a journal volume or book), so despite what you might expect, the title is italicized in APA. This particular manuscript would be formatted as follows.
Peppler, K. A., & Kafai, Y. B. (2011). Youth, technology, and DIY: Developing participatory competencies in creative media production. IUScholarWorks. https://hdl.handle.net/2022/14130
The citation pulls from the “Author,” “Title,” “Date,” and “Permanent Link” fields of the record. Note that APA requires no reference to the publisher of the final version.
When citing a dissertation or thesis in APA, the reference must include the university that conferred the degree. This particular example from IUScholarWorks would be formatted like this:
Montgomery, S. (2025). Traumas and triumphs: Geodized identities in student-created artifacts. [Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University]. IUScholarWorks. https://hdl.handle.net/2022/33619.
Chicago
Unlike APA, the Chicago Manual of Style treats a manuscript as a component part of the repository, and the manual also strongly suggest specifying whether an article is a preprint or another non-final version in either the in-text citation or the footnotes.
Author(s). “Title.” Preprint, Repository, Year, URL.
Using the same manuscript linked above, a completed CMS citation looks like this:
Messan, Komi. “Average Time Until Fixation of a Mutant Allele in a Given Population.” Preprint, IUScholarWorks, 2010, https://hdl.handle.net/2022/13524.
For a dissertation, CMS requires that the degree and institution are specified:
Montgomery, Shaylin. “Traumas and Triumphs: Geodized Identities in Student-created Artifacts.” PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2025, https://hdl.handle.net/2022/33619.
MLA
According to the element vocabulary of MLA style, IUScholarWorks counts as a “container,” which requires it be italicized. This can be seen in their example citation for a working paper. The format for the archived copy in IUSW then is as follows:
Author(s). “Title.” Repository, Year, URL. Preprint.
Using the same manuscript example, a full citation would appear as follows:
Messan, Komi. “Average Time Until Fixation of a Mutant Allele in a Given Population.” IUScholarWorks, 2010, https://hdl.handle.net/2022/13524. Preprint.
Like the other styles, MLA makes a distinction for dissertations, requiring both the name of the degree and the conferring institution.
Montgomery, Shaylin. Traumas and Triumphs: Geodized Identities in Student-created Artifacts. 2025. Indiana U, PhD dissertation. IUScholarWorks, https://hdl.handle.net/2022/33619
Final Thoughts
When considering the citation format for another work, regardless of style, it’s important to remember that a citation exists for three purposes:
- To give credit to the source.
- To give the reader an idea of the nature/format of the source.
- To give the reader the information they need to locate the source for their own uses.
All three of these are partially fulfilled by using the handle.net permanent URL that identifies every IUSW deposit. This URL is unique to the archived version. From the linked IUSW page, the reader will be able to find everything they need: the DOI of the version of record, the publisher’s name, and in some rare cases, a link to a version of the document that updates the handle’s copy.
Open Access Week (October 20 – 24) is an annual opportunity to learn and raise awareness about Open Access: free, immediate, online access to scholarly research and the right to use and re-use that research as needed. Click here to see the list of events at IU.
About the author: Elizabeth-Marie Helms is a graduate student in Library Science and the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. A former middle school history teacher, she now studies the public understanding of science and works as an assistant in Scholarly Communications for IU Libraries.
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