Citation Help: APA

APA Style, 7th Edition

Cite in two places: in the text, and at the end of the paper.

• Parenthetical in-text citations (author, date) appear at the end of a sentence before the period. Narrative in-text citations have the author name appear in running text and the date in parentheses immediately after - author (date). 
• A References page at the end of the document has full citations in alphabetical order formatted with a hanging indent. 

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.

Sample Reference Entries

Books

Author, A. A. (Date of publication). Title of book. 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 (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 (pp. 473–487). Information Science Reference/IGI Global.

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

General Formatting Rules

• Most references follow this format: author, date, title, source. 
• Resources without a publication date should have (n.d.) as the publication year.
• Use ampersands (&) when listing multiple authors of a publication.

Examples of In-text Citations

Parenthetical Citations

Placed at the end of a sentence, before the endmark.

• 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).

Narrative Citations

Narrative in-text citations incorporate citation elements into the text. 

• One author: Koehler (2016) 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...

Direct Quotations

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.

• 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).