As noted on the previous page, in-text citations in APA style include the author(s) of the source we are citing, the year the information was created/produced, and page number(s) if we are including a direct quote. There are different ways to create an in-text citation so it will be useful for us to refer to guides such as these from the Online Writing Lab (OWL):

One critical step to follow is to make sure that our in-text citations match the author name(s), or title when no author is listed, of the corresponding bibliographic citation that will go in the Reference list. Therefore, it's easiest to create the bibliographic citation first, so we know what name or title we should use in the in-text citation.

Sample bibliographic citation for the References list:

Howard, J. (2009). Anger over style guide's errors prompts publisher to offer replacements. Chronicle of Higher Education, 56(11), A10.

Once we have the bibliographic citation, we can create our in-text citation. We can either incorporate the author's last name into the sentence itself, or place the author's name in the parentheses with the date, and page number for a direct quote. You can see examples of each of these options below. Note that these examples have the in-text citations bolded to show us what they look like as part of a sentence, but in our own papers, we would not bold our in-text citations.

In-text citation example for a quotation:

According to Howard (2009), "There was disquiet about the number of errors in the book" (p. A10).
She stated, "There was disquiet about the number of errors in the book," but she did not offer an explanation as to why they occurred (Howard, 2009, p. A10).

In-text citation example for a paraphrase or summary:

Howard (2009) compared the updated style guide ...
In a recent study of style guide updates (Howard, 2009), ...

Did you notice? If the in-text citation comes at the end of the sentence, then the final punctuation mark (usually a period) is placed outside the parentheses. Look again the two examples above under In-text citation example for a quotation.

Sample in-text citations from:

"Citing Your Sources: The Basics Canvas Module" by Seattle Central College Library (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Links to an external site.)