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Cite in APA Style: In-text citation

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, 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...

Citing the Same Author

If you are citing the same author in consecutive sentences, cite the source in the first sentence, and in the following sentences do not repeat the citation but instead make it clear in your writing that you are referring to the same source. In subsequent paragraphs, cite it again.  More detail on long paraphrases here.

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.