One important clarification upfront: this article reflects publicly available standards as of April 2026, but each faculty and each supervisor may impose additional or different requirements. Always verify the official guide of your faculty and consult your supervisor before submission.

Why the bibliography matters

Many students discover too late that the bibliography is not a formality. Examination committees reject or penalise theses in which references are incomplete, inconsistent, or formatted according to a style different from the one required by the faculty. If you have ever wondered how to format a bibliography for a Romanian bachelor’s thesis, you already know the answer is not straightforward: it depends on the university, the faculty, and sometimes the department.

Bibliography errors are among the most common reasons theses are returned for correction before the defence. Not because they represent serious content mistakes, but because they signal inattention to detail, precisely what a committee does not want to see on examination day. A well-formatted bibliography section conveys the professionalism and rigour with which you have approached the entire thesis.

Citation styles used in Romania

There is no single national standard. Romanian universities adopt international conventions and adapt them, sometimes quite freely. Here is a quick map of the most commonly encountered styles:

APA (American Psychological Association): the most widespread in social sciences, psychology, education, communications, and business. Both UBB and ASE use APA variants across many faculties.

Chicago / Turabian: preferred in history, philosophy, and literary studies. It comes in two variants: footnotes (Chicago A) and author-date (Chicago B). UBB Faculty of Letters and UB frequently apply this convention.

IEEE: standard in engineering, computer science, and telecommunications. If you are at a technical faculty, this is likely what is required.

Harvard: similar in logic to APA (author, year), but with different formatting details. Some faculties at UBB and UB accept it as an alternative to APA.

Vancouver: specific to medicine and biomedical sciences. UMF Cluj and UMF București require it.

The golden rule: the citation style for your thesis is the one specified in your faculty’s methodology or guide, not the one you personally prefer.

Standards at UBB Cluj-Napoca

Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai does not mandate a single institutional style. Each faculty publishes its own guide. However, some constants exist:

  • Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences: APA 7th edition is the official standard.
  • Faculty of Sociology and Social Work: APA or Chicago B (author-date).
  • Faculty of Letters: Chicago A (footnotes) or a hybrid style specified in the faculty methodology.
  • Faculty of Business: APA, with adaptations for Romanian-language sources.

Citation examples in APA 7 style (common at UBB)

Book:

Pop, A., & Ionescu, M. (2023). *Metode calitative în cercetarea socială*. Editura Universitară.

Journal article:

Mureșan, C. (2022). Tranziția demografică în România post-comunistă. *Revista de Sociologie*, 34(2), 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1234/rs.2022.342

Web source:

Ministerul Educației. (2025). *Cadrul național al calificărilor*. Retrieved 15 March 2026, from https://www.edu.ro/cadrul-national-calificari

In the UBB bibliography, the list is ordered alphabetically by the first author’s surname. When the same author appears more than once, the order is chronological from oldest to most recent.

Standards at ASE București

Academia de Studii Economice primarily uses APA style, with a few institution-specific features. The ASE thesis-writing guide is available on each faculty’s website and is updated periodically.

General ASE rules:

  • The title of a work (book or article) is written in italics.
  • The journal title is in italics, followed by volume(issue), pages.
  • Web sources must include the date of access.
  • In-text references use the (Author, year) or (Author, year, p. XX) format for direct quotations.

Citation examples in APA style (ASE)

Book:

Dinu, V. (2021). *Managementul relațiilor cu clienții*. Editura ASE.

Journal article:

Georgescu, R., & Stancu, I. (2023). Riscul de credit în sectorul bancar românesc. *Economie teoretică și aplicată*, 30(1), 112–130.

Web source:

Institutul Național de Statistică. (2025). *Produsul intern brut trimestrial*. Accessed 10 April 2026. https://insse.ro/cms/ro/content/pib-trimestrial

One ASE-specific detail: when citing a translated work, you must mention the original author, the year of the original edition, the translated title, and the publisher of the Romanian edition. Do not list only the Romanian publisher without indicating that it is a translation.

Standards at UB București

Universitatea din București applies different styles by faculty, with even more variation than UBB in some respects:

  • Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences: APA 7.
  • Faculty of Letters: Chicago A (footnotes + final bibliography).
  • Faculty of Law: a faculty-specific style combining elements of Chicago and Harvard, with strict requirements for citing legislation and case law.
  • Faculty of Journalism and Communication Sciences: APA or Harvard, depending on the supervisor.

Citation examples in Chicago A style (common at UB Faculty of Letters)

Chicago A operates on two levels: footnotes within the text and a bibliography list at the end. The format is not identical in the two locations.

Footnote (first citation, book):

¹ Mircea Eliade, *Sacrul și profanul* (București: Humanitas, 2017), 45.

Footnote (subsequent citation, abbreviated):

⁵ Eliade, *Sacrul și profanul*, 78.

Entry in the final bibliography:

Eliade, Mircea. *Sacrul și profanul*. București: Humanitas, 2017.

Example in Harvard style (UB variant)

Book:

Constantinescu, L. (2020) *Teoria comunicării de masă*. București: Tritonic.

Journal article:

Niță, A. (2024) 'Discursul politic în era rețelelor sociale', *Revista de Comunicare și Relații Publice*, 26(3), pp. 18–35.

The difference from APA: Harvard uses a comma after the year in the bibliography list and quotation marks for the journal article title rather than italics.

Common pitfalls (and how to avoid them)

These are the issues we encounter most frequently in theses submitted for typesetting:

  • Mixed styles. If five sources are in APA and three are in Chicago, it means you copied references from different places without unifying them. Choose one style and apply it consistently throughout the thesis.

  • Missing DOI or URL. Journal articles published after 2000 almost all have a DOI. Citing without the DOI when one exists may lead the committee to conclude you did not verify the original source.

  • Discrepancy between in-text citation and bibliography entry. If the text shows (Popescu, 2021) but the bibliography lists the name as Pop, A., or if the year differs, the committee will flag the error. Check every pair.

  • Wrong order of elements. Each style has a fixed sequence: author → year → title → source → publication details. A list where some entries place the title before the author signals a lack of coherence.

  • Web sources without an access date. Web pages change or disappear. Without the date on which you consulted the source, the reference is incomplete. Always add “Accessed [date], from [URL]” (or the style-appropriate equivalent).

  • Non-uniform journal title abbreviation. Some styles permit abbreviations; others do not. Do not abbreviate unless the guide explicitly requires it.

  • Missing page reference for a direct quotation. Any quotation reproduced between quotation marks must have an author, year, and page number. It is not sufficient for the author to appear in the bibliography if no page number is given in the text.

Tools that can help

Formatting the bibliography manually is possible, but time-consuming and error-prone. Two tools can significantly reduce the workload:

Zotero (free, open source): the most complete reference manager available. You can import sources directly from the browser, organise your library by project, and automatically generate bibliographies in any style (APA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, etc.). It has a plugin for Word and LibreOffice. If you have not used it before, it is worth installing even for a single thesis.

Mendeley (free, with premium features): an alternative from Elsevier with similar functionality. Slightly more commercial, but with a friendly interface and good for team collaboration.

An important warning: automatic generation tools make mistakes. Zotero and Mendeley may pull incorrect data from databases or apply the wrong APA edition if you have not set the exact edition required. Check each generated entry manually (at least the first ten) until you understand where the typical errors appear.

Your supervisor remains the authority. No online article, no tool, and no artificial intelligence can replace your faculty’s official guide and your supervisor’s direct instructions. If there is a conflict between what you read here and what your supervisor says, follow your supervisor.

When to seek assistance

If you have 80, 100, or 150 bibliographic sources (which is not unusual for a solid bachelor’s thesis), manually aligning every entry can consume days from the critical window before submission. Errors accumulate precisely when you are tired and pressed for time.

The right question is not whether you can do this alone, but whether it is worth allocating that time to the bibliography when you still need to finalise your conclusions, run a plagiarism check, and prepare your presentation.

If you understand how to format a bibliography but simply do not have the time to align dozens of references manually, there is a practical option: technical editorial support that takes your list of sources and brings it to the format required by your faculty, without altering the intellectual content of your work.

If your bibliography is too large to align by hand in 2–3 days, we can help. See our bibliography formatting service.

This article was written on the basis of publicly available guides from the universities mentioned and international citation standards available as of April 2026. Standards may change; always verify the current methodology of your faculty.