APA Citations and References

Citations are placed within the text and tell the reader where you found the information. You must use citations for paraphrases, summaries, and quotations – EVERY TIME! All citations are in parentheses and found at the end of the phrase or sentence in your writing. When writing your paper, you will never “forget” to include a citation if you cite as you write.

There are two types of citations – one for summaries and paraphrases and one for quotations.

(A,Y)

(Author, Year of publication)

(A,Y,P)

(Author, Year of publication, Page/paragraph)

3 items that have to be cited

o   Word-for-word quotations

o   Paraphrase - in your own words

o   Summarize - in your own words

Citation Type	First in parentheses	Second in parentheses	Third in parentheses	Examples
Quotation	Authors’ last name	Year of publication	Page number or paragraph number where quote was taken	(Smith, 2007, p. 123). (Smith, Brown, & Jones, 2005, para. 4).
Paraphrase	Authors’ last name	Year of publication		(Smith, 2005). (Smith, Anderson, Jones, & Brown, 2001).
Summarize	Authors’ last name	Year of publication		(Smith, 2005). (Smith, Anderson, Jones, & Brown, 2001).

APA References

Reference listings are the way that you as the writer can direct the reader where to find the same information that you used. Each entry must be complete and accurate so readers (and your instructors) can find the materials. Be sure to check each reference carefully after you have typed them into the document, especially double check the spellings of author’s names.

Each reference listing must contain the following information: Author’s last name and initials; year of publication in parentheses, title of the work, source of information (book, magazine, journal, webcast, etc.), and if taken from the Internet retrieval information and/or the DOI. An easy way to remember is AYTSR – Author/Year of Publication/Title/Source/Retrieval Information.  See the example below.

There are 77 different reference formats listed in the APA manual sixth edition. References are listed in alphabetical order by author’s last name in the last page of most APA papers. Here are three of the most common references we use in writing APA papers.

For a book:

A 1. Author last name,  Author initials

Note, there are commas after each author’s initials if there is more than one author; an

ampersand (&) is used in references instead of the word and.

Y 2. Year of publication

T 3. Title of article or book

The only items capitalized in the titles of all publications are the first letter of the first word, the first letter of the first word following a colon or dash; and proper names. This is the 11P rule – first letter, first letter, and proper names.

S 4. City, State of publisher: Publisher’s name

(Hint: the book title must be italicized).

For example:

• Smith, J.P. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. New York: McGraw Hill.
• Smith, J.P., & Jones, A. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. New York: McGraw Hill.
• Smith, J.P., Jones, A., & Brown, L.S. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. New York: McGraw Hill.

Note, the second and all subsequent lines in the references are indented.

For a hard copy magazine or journal article:

A  1. Author last name, Author initials

Note, there are commas after each author’s initials if there is more than one author; an

ampersand (&) is used in references instead of the word and.

Y  2. Year of publication

T 3. Title of article

The only items capitalized in the titles of all publications are the first letter of the first word, the first letter of the first word following a colon or dash; and proper names. This is the 11P rule – first letter, first letter, and proper names.

S 4. Full name of the magazine or journal in italics. Volume and issue number of the magazine written in italics as: 12(3)

The 12 is the volume number, the 3 in parentheses is the issue number. We do not use

the words volume or issue, but done in this format everyone knows that the first number

is the volume and the second is the issue.

Page numbers in which the article appeared – we put in the page numbers only as in 123-150.

For example:

• Smith, J.P. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. The Journal of English Teaching, 12(3), 132-136.
• Smith, J.P., & Jones, A. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. The Journal of English Teaching, 12(3), 132-136.
• Smith, J.P., Jones, A., & Brown, L.S. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. The Journal of English Teaching, 12(3), 132-136.

If you have a hard copy of this article, then you are done.

If you retrieved this article from a website or database, there are a few more items to include:

R 5. The words Retrieved from The Internet database or direct link URL in which the article was found

For example:

• Smith, J.P. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. The Journal of English Teaching, 12(3), 132-136. Retrieved from ProQuest database.
• Smith, J.P. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. The Journal of English Teaching, 12(3), 132-136. doi: 10.1080/14658903983939
• Smith, J.P., & Jones, A. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. The Journal of English Teaching, 12(3), 132-136. Retrieved from http://www.journalofenglish.edu/paper/morestuff/paper1.html
• Smith, J.P., Jones, A., & Brown, L.S. (2003). Communicating effectively in a research paper. The Journal of English Teaching, 12(3), 132-136. Retrieved from http://www.journalofenglish.edu/paper/morestuff/paper1.html

Dates are written out fully and the URL does not include a blue font or underline. In order to remove these, right mouse click over the top of the link and a popup box comes up. Click on Remove Hyperlink.

For Internet-based documents:

When collecting information from a website, the same process follows as for books and journals:

A 1. Author last name, Author initials

 Y 2. Year of publication

T 3. Title of article or book

The information changes from this point on. In many cases, electronic documents have not been published in print. So we have to put no other information in, except for the when we retrieved the document and from where.

R 4. The words Retrieved from, the Internet database or direct link URL in which the article was found.