APA In Text Citations

Purdue OWL: APA Formatting and Style Guide

7/21/15, 11:51 AM

General Writing • Research and Citation • Teaching and Tutoring • Subject-Specific Writing •
Job Search Writing • ESL
This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/). When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at bottom.

In-Text Citations: The Basics
Summary:
APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences. This resource, revised according to the 6th edition, second printing of the APA manual, offers examples for the general format of
APA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page. For more information, please consult the
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, (6th ed., 2nd printing).
Contributors:Joshua M. Paiz, Elizabeth Angeli, Jodi Wagner, Elena Lawrick, Kristen Moore, Michael Anderson, Lars
Soderlund, Allen Brizee, Russell Keck
Last Edited: 2014-11-11 10:20:40
Reference citations in text are covered on pages 169-179 of the Publication Manual. What follows are some general guidelines for referring to the works of others in your essay.
Note: APA style requires authors to use the past tense or present perfect tense when using signal phrases to describe earlier research, for example, Jones (1998) found or Jones (1998) has found...

APA citation basics
When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author 's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998), and a complete reference should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper.
If you are referring to an idea from another work but NOT directly quoting the material, or making reference to an entire book, article or other work, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication and not the page number in your in-text reference. All sources

Citations: Note: APA style requires authors to use the past tense or present perfect tense when using signal phrases to describe earlier research, for example, Jones (1998) found or Jones (1998) has found... year of publication for the source should appear in the text, for example, (Jones, 1998), and a complete reference should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper. According to Jones (1998), "Students often had difficulty using APA style, especially when it was their first time" (p Jones (1998) found "students often had difficulty using APA style" (p. 199); what implications does this have for teachers? She stated, "Students often had difficulty using APA style" (Jones, 1998, p. Jones 's (1998) study found the following: Students often had difficulty using APA style, your in-text reference, but APA guidelines encourage you to also provide the page number (although it is not required.) According to Jones (1998), APA style is a difficult citation format for APA style is a difficult citation format for first-time learners (Jones, 1998, p