Citations –APA styleHow to cite within the body of your essay or assignment

What is a citation? A citation is an in-text note that tells

your reader you are using information from a source.

Citations are important because if you don’t show where you got your information from, you could be accused of plagiarism.

Citations show your reader where you got your quotation from.

How to make a citation For APA (American Psychological

Association) citations, you need the author of the article or book, the date the book or journal was published, and the page number.

Much of what we know about string theory comes from the work of Heisenberg (Whittington, 2009, p. 64).

For texts with two or three authors For texts with two or three authors, use

all the authors’ last names, in the order they are listed.

String theory’s origins can be traced back to 1942 (Whittington, Jones, & Peabody, 2011, p. 73-74).

Use the ampersand (&) before the last name listed.

For texts with more than three authors Write the first author’s last name, followed by

the Latin phrase et al. Et al. means “and others,” and implies that there are more authors that aren’t listed.

String theory began in Heisenberg’s lab in 1942 (Whittington et al., 2011, p. 43).

Note that there is a period after “al.” followed by a comma.

You can mention the authors’ names in your own sentence… Whittington, Jones, and Peabody assert

that string theory began in Heisenberg’s lab in 1942 (2011, p. 42).

Since you already mentioned the authors, you only have to include the year of publication and the page number in your citation.

You can mention the year of publication in your own sentence… Whittington et al. assert in their 2011

article that string theory began in Heisenberg’s lab (p. 43).

Here, you only have to include the page number in your citation because you’ve already mentioned the author(s) and the date of publication.

Citing websites When you cite a website, you need to include

the author or authors’ names (if available), the year the information was last updated, and the page number (if available, but probably it won’t be), just like a book or article.

According to recent studies, students do not recognize Heisenberg as the “father” of string theory (“History of String Theory,” n.d.).

Here, the title of the website is in quotation marks, and “n.d” means that no date is listed. There is no page number either.

When citing more than one source When your information comes from

more than one source, you list the information in the citation as you usually would. Then, you add the next citation after a semi-colon.

Many studies agree that students do not understand string theory (Whittington et al., 2011, p. 43; MIT., “Student Responses to Theoretical Physics”, n.d.).

Summary & Tips Use the ampersand (&) before the last

person named, if more than two authors.

Use et al. with a period after the “al” when there are more than three authors listed.

Use p. before writing the page number. Use a semi-colon (;) between multiple

citations in the same parentheses.