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This is a guide to citing sources commonly used in academic papers in APA Style (7th ed., 2020). For more information see the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association or the APA Citation Guide.
When you use another person's words, ideas, or images in your paper you must cite (i.e. credit) the source. This is true even when you paraphrase. Avoid plagiarism by citing all of your sources.
Additional reference examples can be found here: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples
In-text citations are brief credits in the body of a paper. APA Style uses the author-date citation system.
In-text citations are made up of the name of the author and the date of publication of a source.
Parenthetical Example:
Research suggests that the Purdue OWL is a good resource for students (Atkins, 2018).
Narrative Example:
Atkins (2018) suggests that the Purdue OWL is a good resource for students.
Group Authors. When an author is a group the name can be abbreviated. For the first in-text citation, provide the full name of the group followed by the abbreviation:
(American Psychological Association [APA], 2018)
Use the abbreviation for subsequent citations: (APA, 2018)
References are full credits for all sources cited in a paper. References are listed at the end of the paper. All of the elements needed to identify and access an information source are included in a reference:
Author: The individual(s) or group(s) responsible for creating the source
Date: The date a source was published
Title: The title of the work being cited
Petting away pre‐exam stress: The effect of therapy dog sessions on student well‐being
The handmaid's tale
Source: How access is provided to a cited work URL & DOI
Parenthetical Example:
As scientific knowledge advances, “the application of CRISPR technology to improve human health is being explored across public and private sectors” (Hong, 2018, p. 503).
Narrative Example:
Hong (2018) stated that “the application of CRISPR technology to improve human health is being explored across public and private sectors” (p. 503).
APA 8.26 pp. 270-27
Researchers have studied how people talk to themselves:
Inner speech is a paradoxical phenomenon. It is an experience that is central to many people’s everyday lives, and yet
it presents considerable challenges to any effort to study it scientifically. Nevertheless, a wide range of methodologies
and approaches have combined to shed light on the subjective experience of inner speech and its cognitive and neural
underpinnings. (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015, p. 957)
Flores et al. (2018) described how they addressed potential researcher bias when working with an intersectional community of transgender people of color:
Everyone on the research team belonged to a stigmatized group but also held privileged identities. Throughout the
research process, we attended to the ways in which our privileged and oppressed identities may have influenced the
research process, findings, and presentation of results. (p. 311)
APA 8.27 pp. 272-273
Direct quotations from sources that do not contain pages should not reference a page number. Instead, you may reference another logical identifying element: a paragraph, a chapter number, a section number, a table number, or something else.
Example: People planning for retirement need more than just money—they also “need to stockpile their emotional reserves” to ensure adequate support from family and friends (Chamberlin, 2014, para. 1).
The Purpose of Headings
• Identify content within sections of a paper
• Help the reader read the paper with ease
• Help the writer keep their ideas organized
A Good Heading is descriptive and concise. Headings should be well formatted and worded to aid visual and nonvisual readers of all abilities.
Different Heading Levels
• The number of headings used depends on the length and complexity of the paper.
• Short papers may require no headings, whereas longer papers may.
• If a paper uses headings, each main section of the paper should have a heading.
• When a new main section is introduced, use a Level-1 heading.
• If a main section requires subsections, then a minimum of two subsections is required.
• Each subsection of a paper must include a minimum of two paragraphs.
Common Errors in Relation to Headings
• Labelling headings with numbers or letters
• Single spacing within headings
• Adding extra blank lines above or below headings, your heading may end up at the bottom of a page: do not add extra blank lines to situate it at the top of the next page.
How to Format Headings
In headings most words are capitalized with title casing.
*Title Casing: The first word, and all words with four or more letters, are capitalized
Level | Format |
1 |
Center, Bold, Upper and Lowercase Heading Text begins as new paragraph. |
2 |
Flush Left, Bold, Upper and Lowercase Heading Text begins as new paragraph. |
3 |
Flush Left, Bold, Italics, Upper and Lowercase Heading Text begins as new paragraph. |
4 | Indent, Bold, Uppercase and Lowercase Heading with a Period at the End. Text begins on the same line. |
5 | Indent, Bold, Italics, Uppercase and Lowercase Heading with a Period at the End. Text begins on the same line. |