SW 4100: Social Work Research Methods: APA Citation

It's important to cite sources in order to:

• Help others find the information you used
• Build your own credibility as a well-informed writer
• Give credit to those who created the information you used
• Be an Aggie (USU Student Code)

How can you use someone else's ideas in your work? There are three ways, all of which require a citation:

• Summarizing - Offering a general recap (in your own words) of the author's main ideas
• Paraphrasing - Rephrasing a specific portion of the authors work into your own words
• Quoting - Using the author's exact words (in quotes)

The American Psychological Association (APA) citation style requires two elements: in-text citations and a reference list.

In-text citations

• Present throughout your paper
• Required when you use another author/source's content
• Include author(s) and date:
  • In terms of organizational capacity, rural nonprofits in the Southern United States tend to be able to recruit diverse leaders, though they struggle with self-evaluation such as performance evaluation of board members (Walters & Wallis, 2021).
• Also include page number when quoting directly:
  • As a recent study of rural nonprofits in the region points out, a lack of “empirical data regarding the performance of board members…may impact other areas of organizational capacity” (Walters & Wallis, 2021, p. 407).

Reference list

• Appears at the end of your work & helps your audience find original source
• Is usually on a separate page/slide from the content of your work (essay, brochure, presentation)
• Contains all the sources cited throughout your text via in-text citations 
• Is alphabetized by the last name of the first listed author

APAStyle.org is the most reliable place online to get information about how to cite in this style, including help with in-text citations and your reference list, including lots of example citations for various types of sources.

Citing a journal article, step-by-step:

• Author's name(s) - last name first followed by first initial(s)
• Year of publication - in parentheses
• Title of article - first word, proper nouns, and word after a colon are capitalized
• Title of publication - all words in italics
• Volume number - in italics
• Issue number - no italics
• Page numbers - without p. or the word "page" in front
• DOI, when available - see see DOI box on this guide for more details

Be sure to indent lines after the first (called a hanging indent).

An example:

Walters, J. E., & Wallis, D. (2021). Characteristics and organizational capacity of nonprofits in rural, persistently poor Southern counties in the United States. Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, 7(3), 390-416. https://doi.org/10.20899/jpna.7.3.390-416