APA Citations (7th ed.)

APA has different rules for in-text citations depending on:

• The number of authors of a work
• Whether you are citing a group author that has an abbreviation
• If an author is unknown or anonymous
• If more than one work has the same author and date
• If multiple authors share surnames

For a work with one or two authors, include the author name(s) in every citation.

     (Boucher, 2017)

     (Dawson & Lee, 2021)

     Fitzsimmons and Ibarra (2019)

For a work with three or more authors, include the name of only the first author plus "et al." in every citation, including the first citation:

     (Maldonado et al., 2019)

Unless using one author would create ambiguity:

     Weiss, Dryden, Prentiss, et al. (2018)

     Weiss, Dryden, Baptiste, et al. (2018)

To learn more about avoiding ambiguity with in-text citations, see pp.266-267 of the manual.

Authors may be groups. For example, you may cite a work written by the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC.

If a work is authored by one or two groups, include the group author name(s) in every citation.

     (Buena Vista University, 2021)

     (Harvard University & Cambridge College, 2018)

     (U.S. Department of Agriculture et al., 2019)

If a group author has an abbreviation, introduce the abbreviation in the first citation. In subsequent citations, use the abbreviation in place of the full group name.

     First citation: (North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO], 2017)

     Subsequent citations: (NATO, 2017)

For works with an unknown author, include the title and year of publication in the in-text citation.

If the title of the work is italicized in the reference list, also italicize the title in the in-text citation. If the title of the work is not italicized in the reference list, use double quotation marks around the title in the in-text citation.

Capitalize titles in in-text citations using title case, even though sentence case is used in the reference list entry.

Examples:

     Book with no author: (The Business of Life, 2018)

     Magazine article with no author: ("Parental Involvement and Academic Growth," 2021)

When the author of a work is overtly designated as "Anonymous," this takes the place of the author name in the in-text citation.

     (Anonymous, 2023)

When multiple references have an identical author (or no authors) and publication year, include a lowercase letter after the year. This lowercase letter is also included in the reference entry.

Use only the year with a letter in the in-text citation, even if the reference list entry contains a more specific date.

     (Cohen & Crozier, 2019a)

     (Cohen & Crozier, 2019b)

     (Stendahl, n.d.-a, n.d.-b)

If the first authors of multiple references share the same surname but have different initials, include the first author's initials in all in-text citations, even if the year of publication differs.

     (J. R. Clancey & Thorgard, 2021; M. Clancey, 2019)

If the first authors of multiple references share the same surname and the same initials, cite the works in the standard author-date format.

     (Judge, 2022; Judge & Willard, 2021)

If multiple authors within a single reference share the same surname, the initials are not needed in the in-text citations.

     (Chen & Chen, 2023)