How to Cite an Article in an Essay — MLA and APA In-Text.
Welcome to this Library tutorial on APA citations. In it, you will learn about APA in-text and reference citations. The American Psychological Association developed APA citation style to help you document your sources in a research paper or other project. By employing APA citation style, you will give proper credit to authors whose ideas you.
An essential component of a research paper, in-text citations are a way of acknowledging the ideas of the author(s) of a particular work. Each source that appears as an in-text citation should have a corresponding detailed entry in the References list at the end of the paper.
When you quote, summarize or paraphrase information you found in a source (book, article, etc.), you use in-text citations to give credit to the creator of the information. The purpose of the in-text citation is to give the reader the information needed to find the source in your references list.
Include an in-text citation when you refer to, summarize, paraphrase, or quote from another source. For every in-text citation in your paper, there must be a corresponding entry in your reference list. APA in-text citation style uses the author's last name and the year of publication, for example: (Field, 2005).
If the year of publication of the primary source is known, also include it in the text citation. For example, if you read a work by Lyon et al. (2014) in which Rabbitt (1982) was cited, and you were unable to read Rabbitt’s work yourself, cite Rabbitt’s work as the original source, followed by Lyon et al.’s work as the secondary source.
When you include a sentence or words reproduced from a text (book, article, etc.) in your writing, you should follow the APA style for direct quotations. Your in-text citation for direct quotations should include author, date, and page numbers. Sh ort direct quotes (fewer than 40 words).
Example: The American Psychological Association (APA, 2011) suggested that parents talk to their children about family finances in age-appropriate ways. If the name of the group first appears in parentheses, put the abbreviation in brackets after it, followed by a comma and the year for the citation.