When writing your papers, it essential to recognize other authors who contributed to your work and avoid plagiarism.
Use in-text citations when:
These should always include the author’s last name and year. When using a direct quote, also include the page number.
When paraphrasing or summarizing information, in-text citations must include the author's last name and year of publication. This will be in parenthesis at the end of a sentence, with a space between the name and year, and a comma after the name.
Example 1: single author
Falsely balanced news coverage can distort the public’s perception of expert consensus on an issue (Koehler, 2016).
Example 2: more than one author
Two authors: (Koehler & Smith, 2016)
Three or more authors: (Koehler et al., 2016)
As an alternative to parenthetical citations, you can cite the source in your narrative, which allows you to incorporate the authors more closely into your discussion:
Example 3: narrative citation
Koehler (2016) noted the dangers of falsely balanced news coverage.
When using direct quotations in your paper, your in-text citation should also include a page number when available. The page number will come after the year, with a comma after the year. Longer quotations are to be formatted as a block quotation, meaning the entire quotation starts on a separate line and is indented 0.5 inches. Quotations can also be in narrative format.
Example 1: short quotation (less than 40 words)
Effective teams can be difficult to describe because “high performance along one domain does not translate to high performance along another” (Ervin et al., 2018, p. 470).
Example 2: block quotation (40 or more words)
Researchers have studied how people talk to themselves:
Inner speech is a paradoxical phenomenon. It is an experience that is central to many people’s everyday lives, and yet it presents considerable challenges to any effort to study it scientifically. Nevertheless, a wide range of methodologies and approaches have combined to shed light on the subjective experience of inner speech and its cognitive and neural underpinnings (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015, p. 957).
Example 3: block quotation in narrative form
Flores et al. (2018) described how they addressed potential researcher bias when working with an intersectional community of transgender people of color:
Everyone on the research team belonged to a stigmatized group but also held privileged identities. Throughout the research process, we attended to the ways in which our privileged and oppressed identities may have influenced the research process, findings, and presentation of results. (p. 311)
Use the chart below to determine what to do if you are missing information for in-text citation.
| Missing Element | Solution | In-Text Citation |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Provide the title and year |
(Title, year) Title (year) |
| Date | Provide the author, write “n.d.” for “no date” |
(Author, n.d.) Author (n.d.) |
| Author and date |
Provide the title, write “n.d.” for “no date” |
(Title, n.d.) Title (n.d.) |