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A Citation Guide: APA

How to cite sources for any research project, from a three-minute speech to a doctoral dissertation.

Basic APA reference list format, 7th edition

Here's an example of a Reference List entry for a journal article. See a checklist here.

Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions in storybooks: A comparison 

     of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Psychology of Popular Media
 
     Culture, 8(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185
  • Parenthetical citation: (Grady et al., 2019)
  • Narrative citation: Grady et al. (2019)

 

For directions on how to cite non-scholarly online sources, click here.  For a complete APA student format checklist, click here.  For an APA worksheet with examples, click here. For a list of reference examples, click here.

The APA style manual

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is the authority for style and format of published works in most social sciences and in nursing at NSULA. Its website explains how to assemble a paper (or any publication) and its reference list and also how to cite works in the paper. For a basic reference-list item, click here. An example of a journal article is below, after the boxed guideline for formatting the "source"--in this case, a journal.  Both examples, and many more, are at APAstyle/apa.org,

For a webpage with no author indicated, the author is probably the website producer.