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Nursing: Find APA Citation Style Help

APA Citation Style

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) is the official source for citing in APA style. APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences, such as Psychology, Linguistics, Sociology, Economics, and Criminology, as well as in Business, Education, Kinesiology, and Nursing.

The University Library owns several print copies of the Publication Manual. Those listed as "Reference" in the library catalogue are for in-library use only. While the APA does not provide an institutional e-access model for their manual, individuals are able to purchase an electronic version via Amazon (Kindle), RedShelf, and Vital Source.

Many of the links in this guide lead to the APA Style website. This is an official website of the American Psychological Association. Along with the print Publication Manual, it is the authoritative source for information about APA style and grammar guidelines. 

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In-Text Citations

APA Style uses an Author-Date citation system.  In-text citations are covered in Chapter 8 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed). The links below provide some additional information on in-text citation, taken from the official APA Style website.

General information:

In-text citations consist of the author's last name and publication year. Page numbers are required when quoting and encouraged when paraphrasing.

In-text citations are brief notations within the body of your paper which direct the reader to the corresponding complete citation information at the end of the paper in the References section.

In-text citations have two formats: parenthetical and narrative:

  • parenthetical: the author name and publication date appear in parentheses. 
    • e.g. It was recently discovered that laughter is the best medicine (Hall & Oates, 2020).
  • narrative: the author name is incorporated in the text of your paper as a part of the sentence and the year follows in parentheses.
    • e.g. Hall and Oates (2020) recently discovered that laughter is the best medicine.

References

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) is the official source for citing in APA style.

The reference list at the end of the paper, labeled References, provides the information necessary for readers to identify and retrieve each work cited in the text. To create a reference list entry, first determine the reference group (e.g. textual works, data sets,) and category and then choose the appropriate reference type within the category (e.g. journal article) and follow that example.

The following links lead to examples of references (with corresponding in-text citations) from the official APA Style website. For reference examples not listed on these pages, refer to the Publication Manual or to the APA Style website. 

In This Guide

From the APA Style Website

Other Reference Examples