Assignment | Serial Killer Research (Sawyerr): APA References

Parenthetical Citation:

Some say the moon is "green cheese" (Underwood et al., 2000, p. 134). Others argue that the moon is actually made up of various rocks (Stark et al., 1947).  Everyone is disappointed by this development (Stark et al., 2009, p. 198).

Narrative Citation: Can Be Clunky

It's harder to appropriately namedrop a team of people. Sometimes this can work in certain contexts, but it'll probably be easier to stick with parenthetical.

•  Carter et al. (1969) found that rocks are a disappointing reality.
  • Carter who? This breaks the guidance about introducing people when they've been promoted to the main part of the sentence.

Need to Know:

• For a work with three (3) or more authors, include the name of only the first author plus "et al." in every citation, including the first citation, unless doing so would create ambiguity.
• Page number (if available)
• If use a direct quote,  the page number is required
• If a source is not paginated, use a method most helpful to readers, such as paragraph number or section/heading name to locate quotation.

Need to Know:

• First word or two of the article title
• Unlike the reference entry, Use Title Capitalization in your parenthetical citation for the article title  [APA 8.14]
• "Quotes" if it's an article (unlike the reference entry), Italics if it's a book
• Enough of the title to be unique, but not the entire title

Your in-text citations are, essentially, an abbreviation of your full reference that makes it easy for your reader to very quickly find the citation by skimming the left margin. Author names are typically the first part of the citation, but if you have a source with no named author, the article title becomes the first part. This is what you'll put in parentheses in your paper. You don't have to use the full title -- just the first word or two will be sufficient.

Caveat: an unnamed author is one thing, but if you also cannot locate publisher info or a date, chances are you have a bad choice of article to use in your research. If you don't know who's creating the information, how do you know whether you should trust them?

See also: 

• Group/Association/Corporate Author 

Online Article or Book

She defused the antimatter cannon and closed the wormhole (Rogers, 2014, chap. 15). There is no cheese inside of wormholes (Underwood, 1942, Introduction section).

Rogers emphasizes the character's development by echoing a conversation from earlier in the book (Carter, 2013, para. 10).

What to Include:

• Give a section or header name, e.g. (Gecht-Silver & Duncombe, 2015, Osteoarthritis section). If the headings are long, you can abbreviate/shorten.
• Count the paragraphs, e.g. (Chamberlin, 2014, para. 1).
• Name section and paragraph number, e.g. (De Angelis, 2018, Musical Forays section, para. 4).

Multimedia Sources (Video/Audio)

The heroes renew their resolve to escape the moon following a tense conversation (Stark, 1948,  00:54:30-01:03:00).

If your source has a runtime rather than page numbers, you'll go by the time stamps of particular scenes or quotes.

Examples

Experts agree that "the moon is comprised of green cheese" (Sousa and Thompson, 1953, p. 43).

Sousa supports this theory but adds that "the core could be made of white cheddar" as well ("Deeper," 1990, p. 374).

Need to Know:

• A page number is required for direct quotes. If a source is not paginated, use a method most helpful to readers, such as paragraph number or section/heading name to locate quotation.
• Direct quotes always need to be framed by your own words before and/or after.
• Don't change anything inside quotes!
  • If you do change something (for clarity or to fit your own sentence), place the changed word(s) in square brackets. E.g. Sousa adds that "the core could be [cheese]" as well.
• Keep just what you need -- you have no obligation to keep the author's whole sentence if you don't need it.

Examples

Lunar geologist Dr. Carter (1993) reports that the moon is made of cheese (p. 47). Carter's colleague Dr. Slate has further evidence that it is made of brie and stilton in particular (Moon and Crackers, 1974, p. 178, 234).

Need to Know:

• Not just rewording -- synthesize the info a bit to make it your own while still giving credit to the originator.