Citation Guides: APA 7th Edition

The APA Manual is the official guide to APA style. For a brief guide to APA references and formatting, refer to the SJCC library APA Citation guide, available here as a downloadable document.  

SJCC Library APA Citation Guide

Follow this tutorial to learn how to format and cite your papers using APA Style, 7th edition.

Click the image for an informative example of a research paper with explanations of APA formatting:
 

In-Text Citation Checklist

Q: How should I cite a source multiple times in one paragraph?

Answer from APAStyle.apa.org:

"Repeating a citation
When repeating a citation, show the entire citation; do not, for example, include only a page number (the abbreviation “ibid.” is not used in APA Style). Instead, use the following guidelines:

• Include the author(s) and year for every parenthetical in-text citation.
• Do not repeat the year for narrative in-text citations the second and subsequent times they appear in a single paragraph. Follow this guideline with each new paragraph (i.e., include the year in the first narrative citation in a new paragraph).
• However, if you cite multiple works by the same author or authors, regardless of the publication years, include the date in every in-text citation to prevent ambiguity. For example, if you cite Mohammed and Mahfouz (2017) and Mohammed and Mahfouz (2019), include the year with every citation, even when one of the references is cited multiple times in a single paragraph."

In APA style papers, you are required to include in text citation to sources used.

This is a brief citation within your research paper that is placed after information which is quoted or paraphrased from the sources you. In text citation for APA generally requires three pieces of information:

1. Author's last name
2. Year the source was published
3. The page number the information came from

The in-text citation is often included at the end of a quote or paraphrase and is formatted like this: (Author's Last Name, Year, p. #). However, the placement of the in-text can change depending on  whether or not you introduce the author in your quote or paraphrasing, but the same information for the citation is still required. See examples below.

Example 1 (quoted): "...the predominant measure of the university teacher performance [...] worldwide"  ​(Pounder, 2007, p. 178).

Example 2 (paraphrased): Similarly, Darwin (2012) refers to teacher evaluation as an established orthodoxy...

More on APA In-Text Citations at Purdue OWL.

The last page of your essay is called the "References" list. This is where you list the full citation of the sources you used to write your paper.

To create the citations for your sources:

1. Identify the type of source you are citing (book, magazine article, website, etc.)
2. Look up the APA format for that source type. Owl Purdue Online Writing Lab provides APA Citation formats for the References page. 

Owl Purdue Writing Lab also provides basic rules on the organization and formatting of the APA References page. 

Watch the video below for tips on how to format your APA References page (7th ed.)