Citation Styles: APA

General

• See Waubonsee's Guide: HowTo - Document Your Sources in the APA Style - 7th Edition
• Be mindful that the conventions you use for in-text citations are NOT the same as the conventions used for the References page!
• Double check your work - citation generators are not perfect. 
• Only include information that exists! Do not make up page numbers or any other information just to create a citation/reference entry.

In-text Citations

• Consider completing your References citations first. What comes first in your References citation will determine what goes first in your in-text citation.
• Use a comma to separate the information in in-text citations.
  • Example: (Roberts, 2023, p.4)
• Write out authors' last names for up to 2 authors. For 3+ authors, use "et al." See examples below.
• When your source doesn't have an author, use what comes first in the References citation. This could be the name of an organization or an article title.
  • ("Documenting Ferguson," 2015)
• When you have a source with no date, use "n.d."
  • Example: (Johnson, n.d.)
• You only need to include a page number when you're directly quoting a source.
• Use a single "p." when citing a single page and a "pp." when citing multiple pages.
  • Example: (p. 6) versus (pp. 12-13)
• For a source with no page number, use a paragraph number.
  • Example: (para. 8)
• When quoting a video, use a timestamp of when the quote was said, but only use the time of when the quote started.
  • Example: (Andrews, 2012, 1:15)
• An in-text citation can change just a bit when you refer to the author/authors in the body of the sentence.
  • When you refer to the author in the body of the sentence, follow it immediately with the publication date in parenthesis, even if it is (n.d.). Don't repeat the author's last name and date in the in-text citation. Only include the page number. 
    • Example: Foster and Evans (2016) state, "[insert quote here]" (p. 358).
  • If you're not directly quoting the source, then you don't need to worry about a page/paragraph number. So then you wouldn't have an in-text citation at the end of the sentence at all.
    • Example: Foster and Evans (2016) outline in their research [insert analysis here].

References

• If you're citing just one source, the title of your citation list should be "Reference" whereas if you're citing more than one source, your title should be "References"
• Entries should be double-spaced, listed alphabetically by what comes first in the citation entry, and each entry should have a hanging indent.
  • See our tab "Hanging Indent" for instruction on how to create a hanging indent.
• Use sentence case capitalization for the titles of chapters, books, articles, videos, and documents.
  • Click here for an explanation of sentence case capitalization.
• Write out authors' names up to 20 authors.
  • Click here for a source on how to cite up to and more than 20 authors.