APA 7th Guide - TU Dublin - City Libraries

In-text citations are the first part of the APA referencing style.  They provide basic details on the sources of information you consulted for your work.  Every time you use a piece of information, an argument or an idea which you did not come up with yourself, regardless of whether or not you have put it into your own words, it should be accompanied by an in-text citation.  APA uses the author-date citation system, essentially you are required to provide within the body of your work the author's name and date when the information was published.  From in-text citations, a reader can easily identify sources used in a paper on the reference list to enable them to locate and access the original full-text source. 

Note: you should never use a URL in an in-text citation.  If consulting a web page, treat the same way as you would a book, i.e. list the author and date.  If you cannot identify the author, use the webpage’s title in its place. 

The precise style and formatting of in-text citations depends on how the sentence is structured. 

1) Parenthetical citations: where the author and date are listed in the end of the sentence in parentheses (brackets). 

2) Narrative citation: where the author’s name forms part of the sentence.  In this case, the date is placed in brackets immediately after the name. 

If your writing contains a quotation – that is, if your work uses the exact same words as an original source, it is also necessary to include a page number. 

1) If the quote requires a parenthetical citation, the page number(s) are written after the date, and otherwise everything remains the same. 

2) If the quote requires a narrative citation, then the page number must appear in parentheses at the end of the quote.  The date can either be placed in parentheses immediately after the author’s name, or alongside the page number, separated by a comma.

Note: If the source you are citing has more than two authors, it is acceptable to just include the first author's name, followed by "et al."

3 or more authors in your in-text citations can be shortened to the first author's surname and "et al." (Latin for "and others"): 

(Jones et al., 2021)

Jones et al. (2021) found that...

If this would create ambiguity e.g. a different work has the same first listed author, you need to list the number of authors to distinguish the two works:

(Jones, Smith, Brown et al., 2021)

(Jones, Smith, Zhang et al., 2021)

In the Reference List, list all authors up to 20. For 20 or more authors, list the first 19 followed by ellipsis (...) and the surname of the final author. 

Secondary referencing or indirect citations, is when you want to cite information that you haven't obtained from the original source, but instead discover in another work that has cited it.

When adding an in-text citation in this situation, it is important to list both where the information originally came from and where you found it cited, as in the examples below:

For each of the above, the only details that appear in the reference list are those for the source that you have actually read.

Every source that has been cited must also include a corresponding entry on the Reference List, this has comprehensive information about the sources that you have cited in your work. See example below: