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GEOL 115 Stillinger: Citing Sources

Research guide for the DFC sections of GEOL 115 taught by Michele Stillinger

APA Reference Style

Allow your reader to find and read the sources that influenced your work, those that supported or contradicted your argument.

Think about how readers will access these works. Using a specific reference list style allows your readers to tell which type of source each citation is. That requires following some very tedious and specific rules for creating reference lists.

Here's the start of a reference page:

top of a Reference page

Reference List Citation Examples

Periodicals

Books

Web Sources

Legal Sources

Other Sources

APA 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.).