Citing Sources in APA Style

The American Psychological Association citation style is among the most widely used in academic institutions. For a research paper in psychology, education, or another social science, APA style will be the right choice for citing sources.

The definitive source for information on citing sources and formatting a research paper in any discipline is a style manual. For APA style such a manual is:

American Psychological Association. (2019). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Washington, DC. : American Psychological Association.

The manual is located in the reference section of the library. Look for it by its call number:
REF Z253.P83 2010.

 

APA style also has a website: https://apastyle.apa.org/. It should be consulted for updates on citation formats, especially for documenting electronic sources.

Please see Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University for additional information and examples of how to use APA style.

7th edition updates

More on APA Citation Style

What is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)?
an explanation of Digital Object Identifiers, and instructions on how they are used and found.
Citing Legal References in APA Style
See this webpage for information about citing legal resources.
Cite a Patent
Cite an Image
Cite a tweet
The APA Blog discusses how to cite Twitter and Facebook.
When to use parenthetical references
Information from the APA on when and how to use in-text parenthetical citations
In-Text Citations
and examples from the Oregon Tech library

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Citing in APA Style