APA Citation Guide

In-Text Citation

In-text citations are placed within the body of your essay to document each use of information from a research source.

APA uses author-date format, which usually provides the author's last name and year of publication. The page number(s) of the cited information is required for a direct quotation:

  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman's anti-immigrant writings especially targeted Irish Americans (Knight, 2021). 
  • Emily Bronte "was particularly fond of playing the Romantic and passionate work of Ludwig von Beethoven" (Meyer, 2019, p. 293)

When a source has no page numbers, like many articles on websites, for example, no page number is required in the citation.

In-Text Citation Format Examples

One Author

(Stevens, 1958)

Two Authors

(Laclau & Mouffe, 1985)

Three or More Authors

(Smith et al., 2002)
The phrase "et al." stands for "and others" in Latin. It is a traditional way of denoting multiple authors. Note that "al." has a period because "et al." is an abbreviation for the longer phrase "et alia."

Unknown Author

When a source has no named author, use the first few words of the title in the citation:

(A Short History, 1766)

 

Multiple Sources

To cite more than one source (usually for a summary of a large idea), use a semi-colon to separate the citations included in parentheses. Put them in alphabetical order:
(Butler, 1998; Lipsitz, 1983)