The American Psychological Association developed APA citation style to help you document your
sources in a research paper or other project.
By employing APA citation style you'll give proper credit to authors whose ideas you are
using in your own work.
In a research paper you'll use two types of APA citation.
In text citations are brief and appear among the sentences you write in your paper.
Reference citations are longer and will appear at the back of your paper in your references
list.
Let's see how in-text and reference citations work together.
Let's say you've written this sentence in your paper.
Public and private interactions are vital in an online class.
The sentence expresses an idea rephrased in your own words that you read in an article.
To show where you found the idea you add the author's names and the year the article was
published inside parentheses.
Now anyone who reads your paper will know that you found this idea in a 2006 article
by Blair and hoy.
In the back of your paper in the references list there will be a corresponding reference
citation beginning with the author's names Blair and hoy and the year their article was
published 2006.
Here's another example of a sentence in your paper.
The workplace is as able to prepare someone for success in the Academy as the Academy
is able to prepare someone to enter the workforce.
This one is a direct quotation you're using the exact words from the article you've read
and so you've placed the sentence inside quotation marks.
You also use an in-text citation to show where you found this quotation.
The in-text citation looks the same as our previous example however when you are quoting
directly from an article that has page numbers then you include the page number on which
the quotation appeared in the original article.
This quotation appeared on page 35 of the article by Blair and hoy.
Again this in-text citation will correspond with the reference citation at the back of
your paper for Blair and hoy 2006.
The in-text citations for Blair and hoy 2006 clearly lead to the corresponding citation
in the references list at the back of your paper.
The reference citation begins with the author's names and the year the article was published.
The reference citation also includes the title of the article, the journal in which the article
was published, the volume, issue and page numbers of the article, a link comprising
the DOI for the article.
The DOI or digital object identifier is a unique identifier for the article.
Many articles that you find in library databases will have a link comprising the article's
DOI.
Generally speaking if an article has a link comprising a DOI you will see it as part of
the database record for the article.
If the article you are citing does not have a DOI then simply end the reference citation
with the page numbers.
Taken as a whole the reference citation gives anyone reading your paper all the information
needed to track down the article you have used.
Please note that a citation as it appears in a library database is not in APA format.
The database citation contains elements that you need for your APA reference citation such
as the article title, journal title, volume number and so forth.
But in the database these elements are not formatted according to APA style.
You have to change the database citation so that when you put it in your references list
the citation will be in APA style.
To learn more about APA citations please visit our library web site where you will see a
link for citation help as well as a link for ask a librarian.
You can contact a UMGC librarian for help with APA citation style and any of your research
questions.