It may seem like busy work to cite all of our sources for a research project, but it's absolutely necessary for several reasons:

to give credit to the original author or creator
to add strength and authority to our work
to place our work in a specific research context
to leave a trail for others in case they want to follow our research.

APA style is one commonly used format for citing sources. We don't have to memorize everything in this module; just remember that we can always return to it when we need to look something up. We can also ask questions of our instructor, the librarians, the Writing Center, or the Public Speaking Center.

Things to remember:

There are two places citations are used:
- The in-text citation goes in the text of the paper or presentation
- The bibliographic citation goes in a References page at then end of the paper or presentation.
In-text citations in APA style include the author's last name(s), the publication year, and the page number for direct quotations.
We should integrate quotations, paraphrases, and summaries into our writing using signal phrases. Depending on how we do this, the in-text citation might also be integrated into a sentence, or it might appear at the end of the sentence.
Reference pages include all of our sources with the following formatting:
- Each bibliographic citation starts with the author's last name, or title if there is no author
- Each bibliographic citation is indented using a hanging indent
- The entire References page is organized alphabetically and double-spaced.

There are clear advantages to this kind of formatting. For example, in the following sample of an APA-formatted References page, you can see that having the list alphabetized and indented makes it easy for us to glance down the left side and quickly find the citation that starts with the last name Lentini. And because bibliographic citations follow a specific format, we know that this is a video from 2016.

Sample APA References page with multiple citations

Help

For more help with APA style, contact a librarian at the Highline College Library.