APA Citations: All About In-Text Citations in APA Style
When you've got so many formatting style guides to choose from (and journals also create their own), it can get tricky. Or, what if your target journal says you can follow any style at initial submission? A researcher in the social sciences needs to be familiar with the 7th edition of the American Psychological Association (APA)'s style manual: this style guide is highly popular in not only psychology but also sociology, anthropology, political science, etc. Below, I’ll explain how to use APA style especially for in-text citations. But before we begin, let’s take a quick recap of the essentials of APA style.
APA style for journal papers: Key aspects
When you’re formatting your research paper as per APA style, here are the basic things you should be taking care of:
- Keep 1-inch margins on all 4 sides
- 12-point Times New Roman font with double line spacing
- Page numbers in the top right corner
- Running head of 50 or fewer characters, including spaces
We’ve got a handy cheat sheet covering the basics of APA style for you too.
Formatting APA citations: Basic principles
The citation style followed by the APA style guide is called the “author-date style.” Here, you have a brief in-text citation containing the author(s)’ surnames and year of publication. And this is accompanied by a full entry in the reference list at the end of the paper. When writing or formatting a research paper, here’s what a researcher should know:
- Spellings should match between in-text citations and the reference list.
- Personal communications should be cited in the main text only (but if you’re citing traditional knowledge or oral traditions of indigenous peoples, do go through the APA guidelines for the same).
- All quotations require a citation.
- Avoid using online sources that are not recoverable, such as personal emails, non-archived social media livestreams, or unarchived social media posts.
- Limit long strings of citations, for the sake of readers using assistive technology like screen readers.
- Any facts or figures that are not common knowledge require a citation. You don’t need to cite a source when you state that humans are mammals but you do need to cite a source when you state that depression is a risk factor for suicide ideation.
- Where possible, APA recommends that authors use primary sources rather than secondary sources. This means that you refer to WHO reports on the incidence of malaria in X country, rather than cite a study that has not collected the actual incidence data.
Important: Every citation in the text MUST have a corresponding entry in the reference list. Likewise, every entry in the reference list should be cited at least once in the main text (or figure, table, footnote, or appendix).
Some people may tell you that you should cite only those works that have been published in the last 5-10 years. The APA publicly calls this a myth, and recommends citing reliable, primary sources with the most current information wherever possible. There’s no date cutoff in APA style. If you’re discussing Diana Baumrind’s theory on parenting style, you ought to cite the 1967 article in which she first proposed the concepts of authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting. Of course, some fields like neuropsychology or psycho-oncology advance very rapidly so you do need to make sure you are keeping abreast of latest developments there.
The APA also has a free webinar on how to cite works in the main text using APA style.
APA Citations for a Work with One Author
When you’ve just one author, your citation looks like this:
(Rangypants, 2010)
A longitudinal, multi-center study (Rangypants, 2010) did not find any relationship between sleep duration and dementia risk.
Rangypants (2010) identified economic barriers to access to mental health services.
APA Citations for a Work with Two Authors
If you’re citing a work with two authors, here’s what to do:
Jumpydog and Sitabout (2015) examined the risk of developing anxiety disorders in metabolically healthy obese individuals.
Men who reported 2 or more sexual partners in the last 5 years had a higher risk of suicidal ideation (Hotdog & Hamburger, 2019).
APA Style Citations for a Work with Three or More Authors
When there are 3 or more authors, you’ve got to use “et al.” in the main text:
Duckyboy et al. (2012) examined the lifetime prevalence of affective disorders among cancer survivors.
The relationship between depression and whole-grain intake is not yet clear (Wannabee et al., 2023).
What if there’s no author, no date, or a corporate author?
In case the work you’re citing has no author, use the title instead. Eclose it in quotation marks if it’s a short work and italicize the title if it’s a longer work like a book. If there’s no official date of publication, use “n.d.”
The theme of infant death appears even in nursery rhymes (“Rock a Bye Baby”, n.d.).
If the author is a corporate or an organization, use the name of the organization instead.
School closures have adverse effects on student mental health (UNESCO, 2022).
Using a page number in an APA citation
If you’re directly quoting from your source, apart from using quotation marks or formatting the text as a block quote, you must also give the exact page number(s) you’re referring to.
Mental health literacy has been defined as “knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention” (Happydonkey & Sadmonkey, 2005, p. 56).
We’ll talk about the reference list in APA style in another post, but if formatting a journal article entry is tying you up in knots, here’s another helpful infographic!
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