Citations

Disciplines within the Social Sciences typically use the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) as the preferred style of citation. The newest version of the APA Publication Manual is the 7th edition. It is available in the Blumberg Library and you may also find it in other academic and public libraries. You may also use reliable online sources, the best being those from APA directly at APAStyle.org.

Resources for the 7th Edition:

The definitive guide is the official Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.  Their website it also a great place for examples.  Here are a couple of quick examples of a journal or book citation.

Journal Article:

Author, A.A., & Author, B.B. (Year). Title of the article. Name of the Periodical, volume(issue), #-#. https://doi.org/xxxx

Watson, A. P. (2024). Hallucinated citation analysis: Delving into student-submitted AI-generated sources at the University of Mississippi. Serials Librarian, 85(5/6), 172–180. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2024.2433640

Book:

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Copyright Year). Title of the book (7th ed.). Publisher. DOI or URL

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

In-text Citations:

When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, like, for example, (Jones, 1998).  However, there are more guidelines for direct quotations or using the author's name in the sentence.  Look at the style guide. 

AI hallucinated citations are found in freshman-level papers (Watson, 2024).

Style manuals have very specific formatting instructions.  Look at the guidelines while writing.  Here are some areas that cause students trouble:

• Bold the word "References" on the list of references.
• Students only need to have the page number in the upper right-hand corner of every page, no title in all capital letters.
• Do not include "Retrieved from" prior to the URL in the reference list.
• Use one space after a period.
• Put two double spaces after the title on the title page.
• Use an ampersand (&) in in-text citations with multiple authors (Smith & Johnson, 2019).
• Match citations in text to citations under the reference list.
• Write out numbers if the number is nine or below.  If it is 10 or over, then use numerals.
• The names of the periodicals and volume numbers are italicized, but not the titles of articles. 
• The title of a book is italicized.
• Capitalization of book titles and article titles are finicky.  It is called sentence case capitalization. Look carefully at examples, especially for titles with subheadings and proper nouns.
• Watch the spacing in citations carefully.  For example, there are spaces between initials but none between the volume and issue numbers. 
• Citations generated by databases and citation managers can be incorrect, especially in the capitalization of titles. 
• Generative AI produce hallucinations as citations.

This tutorial, created by a librarian at Valencia and Seminole College in Florida, may help students become acquainted with what they need to know to be successful in using APA 7th Edition. Created in Canvas.