Author-Date Styles (APA and ACW)

Preparing the List of References

Parenthetic (In-Text) Citations

The general format for noting sources within the body of a research paper in APA format is to include the author's last name and the year of publication, separated by a comma, in parentheses directly following the quotation or citation. For example,

In the 1960s, the widespread use of chemical pesticides became a controversial issue as scientists discovered that these pesticides were not only poisoning insects but were entering the tissues of unborn generations of other animal life as well (Carson, 1962).

If you are referring to a specific location with the text, include the page number in the reference:

This destruction of the environment from chemical pesticides is "for the most part irrecoverable" (Carson, 1962, p. 16).

When the author's name is cited in the text, include the year of publication in parentheses directly after the author's name. The parenthetic note at the end of the reference would then include only the page number, if applicable. For example,

According to Rachel Carson (1962), "the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment" (p. 18).

For Internet sources, use parenthetic (in-text) citations just as you would for traditional print and on-print sources. Most electronically-accessed work, however, is not paginated, and many electronic sources may not give a date of publication. Thus, for most electronic works, you may have only an author's last name. For example,

At least one account of the life of Mary Shelley depicts a child who was "treated as if she were born beneath a lucky star" (Bridges).

Remember that the purpose of the parenthetic citation is to point to the referenced work in the list of References, and to allow the reader to find the specific location of the reference within the work. Thus, the parenthetic notation should begin with the same information as does the item in the list of References.

Whenever possible, you may want to include the information within the body of the text itself to avoid awkwardness. For Internet or other electronic sources without pagination, however, in place of the page number, repeat the author's name in parentheses after all direct quotes, even if the name is already included in the text. For example:

According to Beth Cooper Benjamin (1996), Rachel Carson's writings about the environment focused America's view of the world as "an interconnected Web of life" (Benjamin).

The parenthetical note is usually placed right after the passage needing documentation, typically at the end of a sentence and inside the final punctuation mark. For block quotes, however, the parenthetical note is placed outside the final punctuation mark. See Using Sources for more information.

© 1999 by Addison Wesley Longman A division of Pearson Education