APA Citation

In-text citations are included in main body of your paper. They give your reader a quick reference for the source of information and quotations you use in your writing. An in-text citation should contain enough information for the reader to identify the source in the reference list page. 

Basics

APA Style uses an author/date format for in-text citations. A generic in-text citation looks like (Author, date) and is included at the end of a sentence. The author can also be referred to in the body of a sentence, in which case the date in parentheses follows immediately after their name. .  

When a source has no author, use the first few words of the title (or the whole title if short). For titles that are italicized in the reference list, use italics for the short title. For titles that are not italicized in the reference list, put the short title in quotes. 

Page numbers are only required when using a direct quote.

Examples

The more gays, lesbians, and bisexual men and women presented gender nonconformity as children, the more likely they were to experience homophobic violence (D'haese, Dewaele, & Van Houtte, 2016). 

Glas, Richey, Taylor and Zhu (2016) found that older voters were more likely to vote for parties that do not match their expressed issue positions, possibly because they retained attachment to parties they supported when there was less of a divergence between their positions and that of the party. 

Certain sleep problems can be a sign of depression, as well as weight change (Depression, n.d.).

Mutz (2015) argued that when political figures acted in ways on television that violated normal conversational behavior, they "reaffirm viewers' sense that politicians cannot be counted on to obey the same norms for social behavior by which ordinary citizens abide" (p 75).