APA 7: In-Text Citations

Guidance from APA Style, Purdue OWL, & Excelsior OWL

In-text citation is covered in Chapter 8 of the APA Publication Manual

Basic In-Text Citation Guidelines

In-text citation refers to the brief citations included within the text of your paper. They point your reader to the full citation at the end of your paper.

Parenthetical vs. narrative in-text citation

In APA, the in-text citation is generally placed in parenthesis at the end of your sentence with the author's last name and year.

The page number is also required if you are directly quoting from a source.

• Precede a single page number with p.
• Precede a range of pages with pp.
• If page numbers are unavailable, you will need to use the paragraph number preceded by para. or paras.

The period goes after/outside the parenthesis.

You can also include the author's name in the text itself and simply place the year in parenthesis after the author's last name.

• According to Davis (2020), ". " (pp. 52-53).

Direct Quotations

Page/paragraph numbers are required for direct quotations.

Shorter than 40 Words

• "This is a direct quote" (Last name, year, p. or para. #).
  • ". " (Davis, 2020, p. 23).

  Longer that 40 Words

  • Form quote into a block quotation.
  • Don't use quotation marks.
  • Period goes before the in-text citation.

  Narrative Example

  Flores et al. (2018) described how they addressed potential researcher bias when working with an intersectional community of transgender people of color:

  Everyone on the research team belonged to a stigmatized group but also held privileged identities. Throughout the research process, we attended to the ways in which our privileged and oppressed identities may have influenced the research process, findings, and presentation of results. (p. 311)

  Parenthetical Example

  Researchers have studied how people talk to themselves:

  Inner speech is a paradoxical phenomenon. It is an experience that is central to many people’s everyday lives, and yet it presents considerable challenges to any effort to study it scientifically. Nevertheless, a wide range of methodologies and approaches have combined to shed light on the subjective experience of inner speech and its cognitive and neural underpinnings. (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015, p. 957)