APA Style: Two Kinds of Citations

APA Style

In-Text citations

In the APA Style, resources are cited in text with an author-date citation system.  The author-date identifies the complete citation in the alphabetical reference list in the back of the paper.

Author-date

• Kessler (2003) found that........
• There were many plants that did not show this characteristic (Kessler, 2003) 
• In 2003, Kessler's study of........

Other Rules

• When a work has two authors, cite both names every time the reference occurs in the text.
• When a work has three, four, or five authors, include the name of only the first author plus "et al." in every citation, including the first citation, unless doing so would create ambiguity. 

End-of-paper citations (References)

Your reference list should appear at the end of your paper. It provides the information necessary for a reader to locate and retrieve any source you cite in the body of the paper.

• Each source you cite in the paper must appear in your reference list
• Each entry in the reference list must be cited in your text.

• Reference list entries should be alphabetized by the last name of the first author of each work.
• For multiple articles by the same author, or authors listed in the same order, list the entries in chronological order, by year of publication, from earliest to most recent. References with no date precede references with dates, and in-press references are listed last.
  • Miles, D.B. (n.d.).
  • Miles, D.B. (2018).
  • Miles, D.B. (2020a).
  • Miles, D.B. (2020b, April).
  • Miles, D.B. (in press)
• Present the journal title in full.