Quick Tips On How To Cite Your Sources In APA Format Research Papers

American Psychological Association style is widely used in both academic and scholarly writing. It provides general directions on how to structure research papers and how to format in-text citations, footnotes, and a page of references. Students can find a comprehensive manual of the APA in any college library. However, it’s often more useful to study quick tips on the APA aspect that you need to clarify, e.g. how to cite sources in an APA format assignment.

APA Research Paper Citation Basics

In-text citations in APA usually follow the author-date method, so you should provide the author’s last name and the year of publication for the reference in the text right after you have presented the borrowed idea or fact. Remember that a complete reference should be included in the list of works cited after a conclusion and discussion section.

If you are quoting the material directly, you should also provide the page number in your in-text reference. The citation will look like this: (Smith, 2007, p. 211). You can also introduce the quotation by using a commonly accepted form: “name of the author” and “year of publication” followed by a direct short quotation and the page number in parentheses.

7 Simple Tips on How to Format Your In-Text Citations in APA

In truth, there are many nuances related to the APA research paper formatting, so you may need the assistance of a writing center instructor to complete your assignment. However, to get started, you should learn only the following 7 simple tips:

  1. Remember to capitalize proper nouns, including author’s names, and all words more than four letters long within the title of a source if you refer to its title in your paper.
  2. Make sure to capitalize the first word after a colon or dash and both words in a hyphenated compound word.
  3. Outline the titles of books, articles, conference materials, documentaries, and other longer works by italicizing or underlining them.
  4. Provide the titles of shorter works in quotation marks and without any special formatting style.
  5. Carefully select the type of quotation provided, such as a long citation, short quotation, or paraphrasing and keep in mind that they are formatted differently.
  6. Place a long direct citation in a free-standing block of lines without quotation marks, starting on a new line.
  7. Make the reference to the author and the year of publication if you are paraphrasing or summarizing the ideas from other works.

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