APA Format – In-text Citations

In-text citations in APA style are brief references within the body of your paper (as opposed to at the end, in your references list) that acknowledge the sources you’ve consulted and used to support your ideas or arguments. They serve two key purposes:

1. Transparency during reading: In-text citations allow readers to easily identify the specific sources you’ve used immediately adjacent to the referenced material. This enables them to locate the original material for further exploration or verification by linking the in-text reference to the references list.
2. Credibility: In-text citations demonstrate that your work is grounded in existing research and scholarship. They draw attention to the diverse sources that you leaned on to inform your claims and perspectives.

How to Implement In-text Citations in APA Format

You’ll integrate in-text citations in two contexts: when you paraphrase another’s work and when you directly quote them. Follow the guidelines below for using in-text citations:

Paraphrasing

• When you express someone else’s ideas or findings in your own words, you still need to acknowledge the source within the text using the author(s) and publication year.
• Place the author’s last name(s) and publication year in parentheses at the end of your paraphrased sentence.
  • Example: Research suggests that social media use can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness among adolescents (Miller et al., 2022).

Direct Quotations

• When using the exact words from another source, enclose the quoted passage within double quotation marks.
• Immediately following the quotation, include the author’s last name(s), publication year, and the specific page number(s) where the quotation appears, all enclosed in parentheses.
  • Example: A study by Jones (2019) found that “social media can contribute to a sense of inadequacy, particularly when users compare themselves to others’ carefully curated online profiles” (p. 147).

Additional Considerations

• Multiple Authors
  • For works with one or two authors, include both last names separated by a comma
    • Example: (Smith & Jones, 2021)
      
  • For works with three to seven authors, list all last names separated by commas on the first citation and use “et al.” (without italics) in subsequent citations
    • Example: (Garcia, Moore, & Lee, 2018; Garcia et al., 2018)
      
  • For works with eight or more authors, use the first author’s last name followed by “et al.” in all citations
    • Example: (Johnson et al., 2017)
      
• No Author
  • If a source has no identifiable author, use the title of the source enclosed in quotation marks and the publication year in parentheses.
    • Example: (“Social Media and Mental Health,” 2020)
      
• Indirect Sources
  • If you’re referencing information from a source that you haven’t directly read but is cited in another source, use “cited in” followed by the author, publication year of the source you actually consulted.
    • Example: (Brown, as cited in Lee, 2023)

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