Part I How to APA Style: In-Text Citation

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My graduate school is a university that uses APA style as its citation benchmark to check whether the students' works are plagiarized or not. Many friends ask, "How do I cite APA style?", "Where should I put the comma and the brackets?" and "How do I write the author in-text?"

When I first started using the APA style, I was also confused and tripped every now and then. But this APA guidance has helped me, and I hope they can act as your guide too as you write both academic and reflective writing! 📄✍️

Note that this is Part I, and in this part, I would like to focus more on APA Style In-Text Citation. Other aspects regarding APA will be discussed here, so do not forget to subscribe to this web to follow up with the updates 🔔💕 Now, without further ado, let us jump on the topic.

A. How to Make In-Text Citation

In-text citations are citations that you write inside the bracket inside the text of your research paper, within the line of sentences inside the paragraphs where you "borrow" another person's idea. If the author’s name is part of the narrative, include only the year of publication in the parentheses (Mendeley, 2017). Take a look at the example below:

If we are citing 2 sources by the same author published in the exact same year, it is important to differentiate between them by labelling them with “a,” “b,” “c,” and so on right at the end of the in-text citation (Saint Mary's College California Library, n.d.).

Use “n.d.” (meaning “no date”) if no publication date is provided. If we encounter sources that do not provide us with the author’s name, we can shorten the title by skipping words like “the,” “an,” and other non-specific words that won’t help the reader identify the source. Instead, we can use the first 2 or 3 major words of the title, then we can italicize book titles and put article titles, encyclopedia entries, and the names of websites inside quotation marks. Do not forget to also put the retrieval date and the link (Mendeley, 2017).

If we are citing a particular page or chapter of a book or journal, we need to include that information in the parentheses. However, we must not put page numbers from printed website sources as the document might be printed differently for other people. Remember that one page is p. while more than one page is written as pp (Mendeley, 2017).

The table is taken from Saint Mary's College California Library (n.d.)

If we are citing a particular part of a document that has no page numbers, include the paragraph (para.) or section heading with the number of the paragraph, then we write down paragraph number or section heading along with the number of the paragraph (Mendeley, 2017). Take a look at the example below:

• APA style is an easy citation format for first-time learners (Smith, 1998, p. 203).

• Learning theory can predict the learning environment (Schunk, 2012, pp. 1-2).

• One example is a learner-centred environment (Bransford et al., 2000, p. 133, para. 1).

• The Inuit students are not used to being talkative in the class (Bransford et al., 2000, p. 146, box).

B. What to Put as In-Text Citation

Now that we know the way to write In-Text Citation, we also need to know which content can be cited (Saint Mary's College California Library, n.d.). Universal information, definition and global facts are not usually cited. The in-text citation is required for the following:

• Original research, research or thesis title or findings.

• Statistics, facts and numbers.

• Figures and images used.

• The idea of other researchers.

• Text of sentence of other material.

To sum it up, understanding In-Text APA style citation can help us to secure our path towards clean and honest education. It is not easy, but it is not that hard. I hope this can encourage you to adhere to academic integrity and cite your papers properly, too! 📚 📄✍️

See you in Part II How to APA Style: Reference or Bibliography Citation 💕

Reference(s):

Mendeley. (2017). How to cite sources in APA citation format. Mendeley.com. https://www.mendeley.com/guides/apa-citation-guide

Saint Mary's College California Library. (n.d.). APA style 7th edition. In Saint Mary’s College California. Retrieved September 8, 2021, from https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/apa7threv.pdf