APA guide

The APA citation and referencing system (from the American Psychological Association) is used for academic writing in the social sciences and education fields, including linguistics, education, psychology, and others. It is a parenthetical name+date system, that is, author names and publication dates are cited in parentheses within the body of a paper, with full references at the end of the paper. Currently, the 6th edition of the APA is commonly used. The APA guide contains specifications for in-text source citations, end references, and paper format (the format specifications are mainly used for course papers, theses and dissertations, and paper drafts submitted to journals).

1 Overview

The APA style specifies how sources are cited in the text of a paper, by means of in-text citations and end references.

1.1 In-text citation of sources

Works are cited within the text of a paper with author last name(s) and publication year in parentheses, or the author name(s) stated directly in the sentence with years in parentheses. Ampersands (&) are used only inside parentheses for multiple authors, while 'and' is used for names outside of parentheses.

At least one recent applied phonology text by Yavaş (2011) has addressed this issue …
A recent survey (Nevalainen & Traugott, 2012) notes that ...
A recent survey by Nevalainen and Traugott (2012) notes that ...
One recent study (En, Brebner & McCormack, 2014) reported that ...

The in-text citation goes inside the sentence, and if it comes at the end, it still is placed before final punctuation (inside a final period, that is, the period comes after the closing parenthesis of the citation). In the example below, the names and years can all be inside parentheses, or if the name is directly used in the sentence, then the year immediately follows in parentheses.

Such widely skewed distributions have been noted by several recent surveys (Wolfson, 1998; Johns et al.; 2001; Manatee, 2004). However, some like Wolfson (1998) arguing for a best fit from a logistic distribution, while others (Johns et al., 2001; Karpo, 2008) argue for a binomial distribution.

For citing multiple sources together, each entry is separated by a semi-colon, and they are ordered alphabetically according to the first author.

Recent studies have shown that East Asian students overuse certain transitional items (Ahn & Lee, 2001; Kim, 2004; Lee & Smith, 2003; Lee et al., 2008) due to …

For several citations by the same author, these are listed in reverse chronological order.

Several studies of unusual intransitive verb syntax in this language have appeared in recent years (Zhou, 2015; Zhou, 2014).

For a source with three to five authors, all authors are listed the first time the source is cited. If the same source is cited later, the subsequent citation contains the first author followed by the abbreviation 'et al.' for the other names (Latin et alia = ‘and others’) instead of writing out all the names.

One study with Serbian and Slovakian readers (Svrto, Kalus & Paplovsky, 2013) reported slightly different reading patterns with the Cyrillic script than with non-Cyrillic writing systems. .... However, the Serbian study (Svrto et al., 2013) did not adequately control for possible L2 or bilingual interference effects.

For sources with six or more authors, the list is always abbreviated with 'et al.' after the first name. Of course, all names are listed in the end references.

An eye-tracking study on Russian native speakers (Rayner et al., 2015) used a masked priming technique to investigate … An eye-tracking study on Russian native speakers by Rayner et al. (2015) used a masked priming technique to investigate …

In the older APA style, the rule is to use 'et al.' for three or more authors. In the newer APA style (particularly used in psychology), this is used for six or more authors (since psychology researchers often publish many multi-author articles, so “Smith et al., 2002” might apply to multiple papers by Smith and colleagues in 2002).

1.2 End references

At the end of a paper, a section called 'References' appears (or 'Reference', if only one source is used). Full bibliographic information appears here for all sources cited in the text (and only for those cited in the text). Notice that the year appears in parentheses in the final bibliographic citation, in strict APA in formal publications. The titles of books, magazines, and scholarly journals are italicized, followed by the volume number (for journals or other periodicals) and the page numbers. Titles of articles or chapters are not italicized. When the citation is longer than one line, the second line is indented five spaces or one tab space – a hanging indentation format, like below.

References

En, L.G.W., Brebner, C., & McCormack, P. (2014). A preliminary report on the English phonology of typically developing English–Mandarin bilingual preschool Singaporean children. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 49(3), 317-332.

Yavaş, M. (2011). Applied English Phonology. Malden, Mass.: John Wiley & Sons.

The end references are not numbered, but use a hanging indent layout (the first line aligns with the left margin, and the rest of the entry is indented about 1.25 cm to the right). In MS Word, right-click for paragraph properties, and for paragraph format, chose handing indent, and use the default 1.25 cm (1/2 inch) setting. In LibreOffice, edit the paragraph properties or bibliography format properties; manually create a 1.25 cm text indent, and a -1.25 cm reverse indent for the first line. For papers in university and graduate school courses, this section is usually on a separate sheet of paper; for a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation, it forms a separate section or chapter. The bibliographic entries are often double-spaced, at least in course papers and theses.

In official APA, author’s given names are usually initialized, i.e., abbreviated in the end references, e.g., the name John Smith is written as “Smith, J.” This can of course become rather annoying, because “Smith, J.” could also be Jennifer Smith, Jack Smith, Jackqueline Smith, etc.

Journals

Journals are cited as in this example, with the title after the year, and the journal name and volume number are italicized. After the volume number, the issue number is in parentheses (i.e., (2) = issue two of volume 14, or the 14th year of the journal's publications), followed by page numbers. The volume number can be omitted if it is not known.

Zorg, J., Delitz, K., Regan, R., & Krum, A. (1998). Sociocultural aspects of economic growth in ex-Soviet republics. Journal of European Economic and Policy Studies, 14(2), 556-598.

Popular periodicals

Popular periodicals, such as newspapers and magazines, include the date of the particular issue after the year in parentheses.

Springen, K. (1990, December 31). A 100 mile race? No sweat. Newsweek, p. 84.

Books

Books consist of author name(s), year, title, place of publication, and name of publisher.

Nevalainen, T., & Traugott, E. C. (2012). The Oxford handbook of the history of English. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Edited volumes

An edited volume is an academic book that consists of original research papers by various authors, often with one or more editors. The page numbers are in parentheses after the book title. The editors' names are initialized and indicated with '(Ed)' or '(Eds.)' for one or more editors.

Ringbom, H. (1999). High frequency verbs in the ICLE corpus. In A. Renouf (Ed.), Explorations in corpus linguistics (pp. 191-200). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Note the capitalization patterns in these examples. The names of journals or periodicals follow traditional capitalization rules, known as title case, where important words (like all nouns) are capitalized. However, titles of books and articles follow sentence case, where only the following are capitalized: (1) the first word of the title, (2) a word after a colon, semi-colon, or dash, and (3) proper nouns; all other words are not capitalized.

Title case

all content words or longer words are capitalize

• Journal of European Economic and Policy Studies

Sentence case

Only initial words and proper nouns are capitalized

• High frequency verbs in the ICLE corpus
• Seeds of change: Tracing language evolution and agriculture

2 See also

1. Citation systems overview
2. Complete APA style guide
3. Citation guide chart from the Purdue OWL (Online Writers Lab) website