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APA Citation

Introduction​

 

What does it mean to cite a source?

Good question! As a college writer, you have an academic responsibility to support your claims with evidence. Much of this evidence, if not all, will be gathered from articles, books, journals, websites, or films that were written by another person. You must make clear in your own essay where you found your information by citing the author and the source you borrowed from.

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Citation Styles

There are many different ways to cite your sources: MLA, APA, Chicago…the list goes on. 

You must follow one citation style throughout your paper. We use citation styles so that

anyone reading your paper can quickly understand what type of source you read and

efficiently find that source for themselves.

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If you are writing a paper for a social sciences class (nursing, psychology, sociology, criminal

justice, education), you will use APA citation. The APA is a group of academics in the social

sciences known as the American Psychological Association.

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For full information about APA style, you should consult either the Publication Manual of the American Psychological  Association or a writer's handbook like Easy Writer. Copies of both books can be found in the TVCC Library.

Publication Manual of the APA

Publication Manual of the APA

Publication Manual of the APA, 6th ed.

Easy Writer

Easy Writer

Easy Writer, 6th ed., Lunsford

​APA Paper Format

 

When you write a paper in APA style, you must adhere to these formatting guidelines unless otherwise specified by your instructor.

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General Format

  1. Type your paper in 12 pt. Times New Roman.

  2. Double-space the entire paper including cover page, and remove extra spaces between paragraphs.

 

Cover Page

  1. All APA papers have a cover page. Starting a third of the way down the page, center justified, type the title of your paper (each word should be capitalized except for prepositions and articles), your name, your class number, your instructor’s name, and the date, all on separate lines, double-spaced.

  2. Page numbers, right justified, insert the page number. (See the template for more details.)

 

Body of Paper

  1. On the next page, center the title of your paper on the very first line. Each word of your title should be capitalized except for prepositions and articles. Do NOT add any formatting to your title; no bold, italics, or underline!

  2. On the next line, begin to write your paper. Do not add any extra spaces after the title or in between paragraphs.

  3. Under the APA 7th Edition, there is no running header for a student paper, but you must still add page numbers.

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APA Paper Format
In-Text Citation

 

It is always important to cite your sources in the body of your essay. The citations make clear to your reader where your original ideas end and where your evidence begins. You must include a citation for

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  • Direct quotations

  • Summaries

  • Paraphrases

 

Citing Your Sources

An in-text citation in APA lets the reader know the author, year, and page of the source you are quoting or paraphrasing from. An in-text citation looks like this: (Gawande, 2007, p. 9). Notice that the citation, which includes the author’s last name, the publication year,  and a page number separated by commas, is enclosed in parentheses, and the period goes after the citation. You must always use a citation when you quote or paraphrase from another source! Check out this direct quotation from Atul Gawande's book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance:

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The medical profession is necessarily a human profession, as "to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two" (Gawande, 2007, p. 9).

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When you want to summarize or paraphrase in APA, you simply include the author’s name and year without the page number:

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Doctors live in the space between people's personal lives and science (Gawande, 2007).

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Electronic Source

Sometimes, though, you will not have a page number to cite. This happens often when you cite a web page. If you do not have a page number, simply count the paragraphs in the article and include a paragraph (para.) number instead:

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Researcher Thomas Schroeder listed the benefits of the electric eel-inspired devices as "[not] as potentially toxic, and it runs on potentially renewable streams of electrolyte solution” (Young, 2017, para. 2).

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Notice that Thomas Schroeder is mentioned in the signal phrase. He is the one who is speaking because he was interviewed for the article; however, he did NOT write the article I am citing from. The author’s name, Emma Young, is reserved for the in-text citation.

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Author Named in Signal Phrase

If you do name your author in the signal phrase, the pattern changes slightly. Place the year in parentheses directly after the author’s name, and place the page or paragraph number at the end of the quote where it would normally go. If you have paraphrased, leave the page number off.

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Gawande (2007) emphasizes the human nature of the medical profession when he explains that "to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two" (p. 9).

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According to Gawande (2007), doctors live in the space between people's personal lives and science.

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When Not To Cite

If you are providing information that is considered to be common knowledge (American astronauts landed on the moon in the 1960s), you do not need to add a citation.

In-Text Citation
APA Reference Page

 

Every academic paper must end with a list of all of the sources cited in the essay. In APA style, this page is called a Reference page. You must follow this format exactly:

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  • The Reference page is always the last page of your paper.

  • Continue your running head onto the References page.

  • Double-space the entire page.

  • In the center of the first line, type the title References. The title should not be formatted; no bold, italics, or underline!

  • On the next line, begin typing your citations. (See this page for the citation patterns!)

  • Each citation must have a hanging indent. This means that every line after the first of each citation is indented.

  • Alphabetize all of the sources by whatever the first word is. Usually, this means the sources will be alphabetized by the author’s last name, but it may mean that some sources are alphabetized by title.

 

Feel free to download this template. Just copy and paste it as the last page of your document:

APA Reference Page
APA Citation Patterns

 

The people reading your APA style academic paper will expect you to use proper citation conventions to build your references page. In APA, the information that a reader will expect to know about your sources includes

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  • The author (always written Last Name, First Initial)

  • The year the work was published (always written YEAR, Month DD)

  • The title of the work (only capitalize the first letter of the first word)

  • The edition of the work (always written #th ed.)

  • The location of the publisher

  • The publisher of the work

  • The web address, if applicable.

 

But you can’t simply list this information as bullet points on your References page! The order and format of the information is also important. Most importantly, your in-text citations should match your citations exactly. The author's name you use in the in-text citation should appear as the author's name in your citations.

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Print Work

Generally, a citation for a print work will be written in this format:

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Author Name. (Year). Title of work (#th ed.). Location: Publisher.

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Gawande, A. (2007). Better: A surgeon's notes on performance. New York: Metropolitan Books.

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Notice that this citation matches the in-text citations I created when I quoted and paraphrased from Gawande's book in the examples above.

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Online Article

A citation for an online work will be written in this format:

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Author Name. (Year). Title of article. Title of website. Retrieved from URL.

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Young, E. (2017, December 15). Electric eel-inspired devices could power artificial human organs. Scientific American. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-eel-inspired-devices-could-power-artificial-human-organs/.

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Notice that this citation matches the in-text citations I created when I quoted and paraphrased from Young's article in the examples above.

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Journal Article from a Database

A citation for an article from one of the Library databases will be written in this format:

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Author Name. (Year). Title of article. Title of Journal, Volume(Issue), pages. Retrieved from URL of database.

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Ngako, J.K., Van Rensburg, E.S.J., & Mataboge, S.M.L. (2012, Septermber). Psychiatric nurse practitioners' experiences of working with mental health care users presenting with acute symptoms. Curationis, 35(1), 1-9. Retrieved from https://tvcc-access.sage.eou.edu/

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Notice that each piece of information is treated as its own sentence and separated from the next piece of information with a period. If you cannot find any pieces of the required information on the source you are citing, you may skip it in your citation.

APA Citation Patterns

A version of this webpage first appeared on tvccwritinglab.wordpress.com  under a CC-By-SA license.

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