APA Style Guide

The APA, or American Psychological Association, writing style is a guideline used by many branches of human sciences and behavioral studies. It is one of the most recognized styles in current use. The APA style guide covers everything that may be used in a research report, from the cover page through the final citations.

The APA citation rules are not that different from other citation techniques. APA citations list the author(s) of the work, the title, page numbers, copyright, and other facts about the source. Each type of source is cited in a slightly different way, making APA, like most citation styles, difficult to memorize. There are several great online resources on APA style, like the one on Cornell University's APA Citation Style page. Full APA style guides can be found on both OWL at Purdue and Georgia Southern University's APA Research Style Crib Sheet.

There are two types of citations that writers should be aware of when using APA. The first is in-text citations, noting someone else's work within the text of your document. These citations are placed inside parenthesis immediately following the attributed work. For these citations, list the last names of the authors first, in alphabetical order, and then the year their work was done. For example, to refer to the work of a man called Carl Timmons, who published a journal article in 1998 about field mice, you would do this: (Timmons, 1998). This gives your reader the information he or she would need to find that particular article if they wished to read it themselves. Other rules for this type of citation can be found on the Ohio State University citation resource page.

In-text citations are meant to point readers to the more in-depth reference at the end of the report. These end of text references are where authors include all of the details about any work they used when writing. Here is where APA citation becomes a little complicated.

The most common citation used is for an article with only one author, which is referenced in this way:

Last name, first initial. (year published). Title of Article. Journal Title, Volume number, Issue number, page numbers. Digital internet address, date accessed.

The digital internet address is a number code, such as doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.08.002. If the website does not have a digital number, use the actual web address instead.

A book citation is much less detailed. For a book with one author, the citation would look like this:

Last name, First initial. (Year of Printing).Title of book. Publisher.

Dissertations are very similar in citation format to books. The main difference is the inclusion of the access number, if available, and the name of the university where the dissertation was written.

Last name, First initial. (year published). Title of Dissertation. University. Retrieval location, access number.

Not every resource used in writing research papers is in print. Television documentaries, movies, CDs, and other media sources may also be used. The rules for media citations are all a little different from each other, but the name of the producer generally comes first, with details like when the media was released, or its TV air date, the name of the show, and other details following. A citation for a movie would look like this:

Last name, First initial. (producer), & last name, first initial (director/writer). (year released). Title of Movie [motion picture]. Country where the movie was produced. Name of company releasing the film, i.e. Disney, Twentieth Century Fox.

An audio CD is referenced like this:

Artist last name, first initial. (year released). Song Title. On Album Name [CD]. Recording Company.

There are many other types of media citations. Examples for all of them, along with other reference page citation types and general tips for using APA citations can be found on the University of Long Island's APA Citation Style guide. This page features a color-coded guide to using the APA format for citing reference materials.

There are a lot of variations in citation methods when using APA, which can make it challenging to correctly cite each reference in an article. While it is important to know how to use APA, there are several online tools to make using it easier when writing papers. Two of these programs make citing easier by giving users a way to input the data needed for the citation and then providing the correct citation. The most well known of these tools is the Son of Citation Machine, available from The Landmark Project page. The second is from the Oregon School Library Information System. This tool allows users to input data for more than one citation, and then provides all of the citations at once, in the proper order. While these tools are great for doing a lot of different types of APA citations, they should not be used as a substitute for learning the most common citation types.