Citation Help: APA

APA Citations, 7th edition

APA requires two parts: In-text citations throughout your paper and a References page at the end. Always check with your professor for which any specific citation requirements.

Jump to: References | In-text Citations 

APA Templates

Reference Entries

A References page at the end of your document has full citations in alphabetical order formatted with a hanging indent.

General Formatting Rules

• Most references follow this format: Author. (Date). Title. Source. 
• Resources without a named person as author can use the office, department, or publishing organization as an author. For example, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. American Heart Association. Southern Methodist University. 
• Resources without a publication date should have (n.d.) as the publication year.
• Use ampersands (&) when listing multiple authors of a publication.

Books

Author, A. A. (Date of publication). Title of book (# edition). Publisher.

Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press.

Book Chapters

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Date of publication). Title of chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (# ed., page range). Publisher.

Henson, B., & Ricketts, M. (2019). It’s complicated: Social media’s impact on the relationship between our personal and professional lives. In M. Khosrow-Pour (Ed.), Internet and technology addiction: Breakthroughs in research and practice (2nd ed., pp. 473–487). Information Science Reference/IGI Global.

ChatGPT

Before using any generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT, for class assignments, review your syllabus and check with your professor for guidance.

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

Journal Articles

Author, A. A., Author, B. B, & Author, C.C. (Date of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume number (issue number), page range. DOI if available

Mozafari, M., Farahbakhsh, R., & Crespi, N. (2020). Hate speech detection and racial bias mitigation in social media based on BERT model. PLoS ONE, 15(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0237861

Magazines

Author, A. (Year, Month). Title of article. Title of Magazine, volume (issue), page-page.

Peterzell, J. (1990, April). Better late than never. Time, 135(17), 20–21.

Websites

Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of article. Site name. http://webaddress.com

Mennis, G. (2022, May 25). Savings rate fills out picture of workers' retirement security. Pew. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2022/05/savings-rate-fills-out-picture-of-workers-retirement-security

If the page is written by a group or organization, use the group or organization name as the author. When contents of a page are designed to change over time, include a retrieval date in the reference. 

U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). U.S. and world population clock. U.S. Department of Commerce. Retrieved January 9, 2020, from https://www.census.gov/popclock/

Exclude the site name if it is the same as the author.

World Health Organization. (2018, May 24). The top 10 causes of death. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death

Datasets & Data

 Author/Producer. (YYYY, Month Day). Dataset title: chart title version [Data set]. Publisher Name. https://doi.org/xxxxx or URL

Energy Information Administration. (2021, March 7). Retail gasoline prices: All grades, 08/20/1990 - 03/01/2021 [Data set]. Data Planet. https://doi.org/10.6068/DP1781EB4CE0666

If the author and the publisher are the same, you can skip the publisher part of the citation.

World Bank. (2012). World Development Indicators: GNI per capita, Atlas method [Data set]. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD 

Include the retrieval date only if the data is likely to change frequently. 

Code Compliance Services Department, Consumer Health Division. (2023, April 15). Restaurant and food establishment inspections (Oct. 2016 to present) [Data set]. City of Dallas. Retrieved May 15, 2023 from https://www.dallasopendata.com/Services/Restaurant-and-Food-Establishment-Inspections-Octo/dri5-wcct

In-text Citations

Every in-text citation must correspond with a full citation on the References page, and vice versa. You can't include a source in your references list if you don't also cite it in your paper.

Parenthetical Citations

Place at the end of a sentence, before the ending punctuation mark.

• One author: Falsely balanced news coverage can distort the public’s perception of expert consensus on an issue (Koehler, 2016).
• Two authors: Others have contended the opposite reaction was more likely (Salas & D'Agostino, 2020).
• Three or more authors: Discussion has been wide-ranging (Martin et al., 2020).
• No author and/or no date: Citation is important for many reasons ("Using Citations", n.d.)
  • Remember that APA does allow use of an office or a department as the author, or even "Anonymous" as an author, so no-author citations should be rare.
  • If there is truly no author, use the first two or three words of the title.
  • The title of a chapter, article, or web page is in quotation marks in-text; the title of books or reports is in italics.

Narrative Citations

Narrative in-text citations incorporate citation elements into the text of the paper. The year can go in parentheses or also in the text.

• One author: Koehler in his 2016 study noted the possibility of...
• Two authors: Salas and D'Agustino (2020) contend that this effect...
• Three or more authors: Martin et al. (2020) discuss this theory...
• No author and/or no date: The article "Using Citations" (n.d.) discusses many reasons...

Page Numbers

For short quotations of fewer than 40 words, add quotation marks around the words and incorporate the quote into your own text. Add the page number to the parenthetical citation.

You may also add a page number to make it easier for your reader to find the information, such as when citing within a book.

• Effective teams can be difficult to describe because “high performance along one domain does not translate to high performance along another” (Ervin et al., 2018, p. 470).
• Fry (2018) notes how computer algorithms often have been underestimated (p. 7). 

Block Quotes

For longer quotations of more than 40 words, format the quote in its own paragraph, with the entire section indented 1/2". Do not use quotation marks around it, and include the standard citation information at the end. 

For example, if you wished to quote the entire first paragraph of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, that would be formatted as a block quote: 

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?' (Carroll 9)

Notice that the block quote has no punctuation mark after the parenthetical citation.