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APA Style 7th ed Citation Guide - Langara Library

In-Text Citation Examples

In APA Style, your sources are cited in-text (i.e. in the text of your paper) using an author-date format.

Source Parenthetical In-Text Citation Narrative In-Text Citation
With 1 author (Greene, 2018) Greene (2018)
With 2 authors (Scarlett & New, 2019) Scarlett and New (2019)
With 3 or more authors (Gibson et al., 2020) Gibson et al. (2020)
With no author*

(The First Few Words of the Book Title, 2016)

("The First Few Words of the Article Title," 2019)

The First Few Words of the Book Title (2016)

"The First Few Words of the Article Title" (2019)

With  no date (Jarry, n.d.) Jarry (n.d.)

Group author with abbreviation:

First citation

Subsequent citation

 

(Canadian Institute of Health Research [CIHI], 2020)

(CIHI, 2020)

 

Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHI, 2020)

CIHI (2020)

Specific parts or direct quotation

(Molgat, 2018, pp. 18-21)

(Stockert & Higuchi, 2015, p. 997)

(Public Safety Canada, 2019, Chapter 3)

(Wong, 2017, para. 2)

Molgat (2018) ...(pp. 182-21).

Stockert and Higuchi (2015) ...(p. 997).

Public Safety Canada (2019) ...(Chapter 3).

Wong (2017) ...(para. 2).

Multiple sources (Bishop, 2019; Dai, 2018; Greene, 2020) Bishop (2019), Dai (2018), and Greene (2020) ...

 

* When there is no author, use the title of the work instead. In the in-text citation, use title case, i.e. capitalize the words in the title as shown in the examples above. In the references list, the title of the same work will be spelled out in sentence case, i.e. only the first word of the title, the first word of the subtitle, and proper nouns will be capitalized.