APA - Referencing Guide

Single author

• Short references within the text are given wholly or partly in round brackets.

• Use only the surname of the author followed by a comma and the year of publication:

(Matthews, 2019)

• Include page, chapter or section numbers if you need to be specific. The abbreviation for page is p. and the abbreviation for pages is pp.:

Matthews discusses the role of drawings in the psychological evaluation of children (2019, pp. 34-35). OR
... in the psychological evaluation of children has been studied elsewhere (Matthews, 2019, pp. 34-35).

Two authors

• Cite both authors every time you cite within the text.

• Separate the authors' names in the citation with an ampersand (&):

(Lawson & Green, 2017, pp. 34-35)

• When the authors' names are incorporated into the text the "&" is replaced with "and". Always cite both names every time the reference occurs in the text:

Lawson and Green (2017, pp. 34-35) were unable ...

Three or more authors

• For a work with three or more authors, include the name of the first author only followed by et al. in every citation, including the first citation, unless doing so would create ambiguity:

Wasserstein et al. (2014, p. 301) have found ... OR
... as has been found in a previous study (Wasserstein et al., 2014, p. 301).

• To avoid ambiguity, include as many author names as necessary followed by et al.:

Kapoor, Bloom, Montez, et al. (2017)
Kapoor, Bloom, Zucker, et al. (2017)

• As et al. is plural, include all names in the citation when only the final name is different.

Authors with the same surname

• Make a distinction between authors with the same surname by including the author's initials.

• If the author's surname is incorporated in the text place the initials before the surname; if it is a citation within brackets the initials follow the surname:

The theory was propounded in 1970 (Larsen A.E., 2021) ...
M.K. Larsen (2023) is among those ...

Multiple works by the same author in the same year

• A distinction is made by adding lower case letters, a, b, c, etc. to the date.

• These letters are also included in the full reference in the reference list to distinguish between the two documents:

Bursch (2015a) described how the yak made transport possible in the high mountains of Inner Asia, as did the llama in the Andes of South America (Bursch, 2015b).

Corporate author

• These are works without a personal author.

• Corporate authors may be associations, agencies like government departments, corporations or organisations.

• Names of organisations should be given in full the first time they are cited within the text, followed by any relevant abbreviation.

• In subsequent citations, the abbreviation may be used:

(CSIRO, 2019) ...

More than one work cited

• List all sources of information either in the text or within the citation in alphabetical order, separated by a semicolon (;):

(Haddon, 2019; Larsen, 2021) ...
Haddon (2019) and Larsen (2021) demonstrated that ...
(Haddon, 2019, Vol. 3, p. 734; Larsen, 2021, p. 11)

No author

• When a work has no author, cite in the text the first few words of the reference list entry (usually the title) and the year.

• Use italics for the title:

This was apparently not the case in seventeenth-century England (On Travelling to London, 1683) ... OR
On Travelling to London (1683) reveals that this was not true.

• If the author is specifically given as "Anonymous", then Anonymous takes the place of the author name in the in text citation:

(Anonymous, 2017)

No date of publication

• Use the abbreviation n.d. to indicate that no date of publication is given:

Carruthers (n.d.) has suggested ... OR
(Carruthers, n.d.)

• Citing in the Text
• Citation Methods
• Citation Examples
• Citing Electronic Documents
• Citing Images
• Citing Personal Communications
• Citing Secondary Sources