Emma Flores knows all about formatting standards. She shares with StudyCrumb readers tips on creating academic papers that will meet high-quality standards.
Are you writing an essay or article and need to use an APA in-text citation? You can simply convey other people's ideas in your own words or make a direct quote APA. But you still have to refer to the taken sources. Otherwise, it will be considered plagiarism. And that can lead to severe consequences.
In APA style, in-text citation typically includes the author's last name and the year of publication. It appears in parentheses within the text of your paper.
There are may be slight variations depending on how many authors you need to mantion or availability of publication date. That's why it's important to use a correct APA in-text citation format in each specifc instance. In this article, we will go through main rules on how to make in-text citations in APA format. Read on this blog post to find out structures and examples of in-text references.
For making an APA in-text citation, first of all, we need to know two main pieces of information:
Reference list in APA citation is placed at the end of your work on a separate page. Obviously, you should provide information from in-text citations there.
In-text citation in APA style is made to help your reader find the information you are referring to. To make it perfect, include the author's name and year in the text. And then make a reference list, where you also add page number and publishing info. Citations could be different depending on the type of resource. A magazine article differs from a book, for example. But knowing the basics makes the process more manageable if you're trying to cite something more complex. So we hope to be helpful and wish you good luck with your academic pursuits! If you ever wonders who might write my paper in APA format, let us know.
There are two main ways of APA in-text citations. You can include an author's name at the beginning of your sentence, using only last name:
Put publication date into parentheses. No punctuation is needed to highlight an author's name - just mention an author in your sentence.
Another way of formatting an APA citation is to place a quote at the end of a sentence without explicitly identifying an author. It would look like this:
As you do so, both author and publication date are enclosed into parentheses and separated by a comma. Always include the author first, then specify a date.
So let's find out how to do it step by step!
You should cite multiple authors if this book was written by more than one person. If you have two authors, you can separate their names with ampersands. If you have more than two authors, separate their last names using commas and ampersands.
Feel free to use this APA in-text citation sample for reference:
Check out this sample of APA in-text citation with 3 authors:
If you have three or more authors, you can always use “and others''. This indicates that this book has many authors as shown below.
When formatting an in-text citation in APA style, it's necessary to include a page number to explain where you got this information from. Let's say you find a quote on page 123:
There are two ways you can quote this information. Regardless of which method you choose, always include page numbers at a sentence end, even if you have the author's name and publication date before that.
The page number is at the end, so put "p" with a period in front of a page number.
As before, you need to place information in parentheses at the end of your sentence and separate it with commas.
Last but not least, don't forget to put punctuation marks in your APA in-text citation. Quotation marks must be placed before author and date.
For example:
Like in-text citations, it is necessary to start a reference list with the author's name. But here, you only need initials. First, write the author's last name, then put a comma and indicate initials with periods.
For example:
If you have more than one author, include them in your quote. Then, put the publication date into parentheses.
For example:
Unlike other types of citation, in APA style paper, you should capitalize only the first word of a title and subtitle. Our sample looks like this:
In this case, the main heading is "The World in Our Words", and the subtitle is "Why is this happening". Then, a full stop is needed.
You can find the city and state of publication on the title page or its back. Use state abbreviations without dots. Put a comma between city and state and then a colon before publishing's name. Let's say a book was published by Treehouse Publishers in New York. APA in-text citation sample would be as follows:
Comments
If there is a situation when you have already mentioned the author in the body of the text (For example, Anderson proved the theory…), then you should include only the year and page number (if possible). It will look like this: Anderson proved the theory…(2020, p. 39)
Hope this helps!
Yes, you are absolutely right. You should include a shortened title in your in-text citation when there is no known author. The right way to shorten your title is to include the first 2-4 words or initial noun phrase. Note that you should omit articles as well.
To give you a better understanding, here is the example: “Project procurement management: contracting, subcontracting, teamwork.” shortened will look like “ Project procurement management.”
We hope this information will help you. Good luck!