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APA Citation Style 7th ed.: In-Text Citations

In-Text Citations

In-text citations generally include the author's last name, the year of publication of the article, book, internet posting, etc,. and, in some cases, the page number. Typical citations look like this:

...humans find young bears are incredibly cute (Johnson & Smith, 2019).

If you include the author's name in your narrative, just include the year in the parentheses:

Johnson and Smith (2019) found that young bears were incredibly cute.

Determine elements (like author and date) based on the full reference list citation. For example, if a source lacks an author (such as a Wikipedia page), use the title of the paper in the author location, like in this example :

Bears are found in over sixty countries, mostly in Asia, North America, and Europe ("Bear," n.d.).

Paraphrasing In-Text Citations

Even if you write about research or an idea in your own words, you still need to cite its source, but you do not need to include page numbers..

Hearing children interact with schools in a different way than their Deaf parents, leading to frustration for the children (Buchino, 1993).

Are you writing a paragraph from one source? Don't want to cite the same article 14 times? APA feels your pain. Look at the "Long Paraphrase" section from APA.

Quoting In-Text Citations

If you are quoting, try to include a way for your reader to find the exact words in the paper: by page number, paragraph, or figure number.

"The deaf parents saw school as a place away from home where teachers and kids were like family, and the  [hearing] children did not relate to school in that manner at all"(Buchino, 1993, p. 43).

Block Quotes In-Text Citations

For quotes longer than 40 words, use blockquotes: indent the quote, but do NOT use quotation marks:

Suggestions for counseling hearing children with deaf parents include:

Mental health professionals should help the children become aware of which issues are related to the parent being deaf and which are related to growing up differently from their parents. Discussions of what is important in communicating with parents may help the children understand that being able to speak does not ensure good communication between parent and child. (Buchino, 1993, p. 44).

Counseling for parents is also warranted.

Personal Communications

Citations are intended to allow anyone to read the original. "Personal communications" are ephemeral; they don't allow others to read, see, or hear the material. These include talks or lectures you have heard, but aren't recorded in print or video that your reader can access. Cite these materials in the paper and try to be as specific as possible about the date.

And the next day after she'd left the hats on the tree, someone left a sign, saying "Thank You Hat Tree" (M.A. Davidson, personal communication, July 20, 2019).

Suppose you read a great quote in an article, but the author is quoting or paraphrasing a previous article. Try to find the original article and cite that. There are several reasons to read the original:

  1. The quote might be misquoted.
  2. The interpretation might be incorrect or you disagree with the interpretation.
  3. Taken out of context, the quote might differ from the author's intention.
  4. If the quote is so wonderful and so on point, there might be other information in the article that you can use.

However, if you cannot acquire the original, you should cite the original article and the secondary one using "as cited by"

Ex.

If you'd like to cite a secondary quote from the following chapter

Chen Pichler, D., & Koulidobrova, H. (2015). Acquisition of sign language as a second language. In M. Marschark, & P. E. Spencer (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of Deaf studies in language (pp. 218—230). Oxford University Press.

Cite it in-text as

“A long dinner among Deaf users of different sign languages will, after a while, permit surprisingly complex interchanges” (Newport & Supalla, 2000, as cited in Chen Pichler & Kouildobrova, 2015, p. 220).

Only cite the article you read in the reference list.

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