APA Citation Help, 6th Edition

Using citations will help preserve your:

• Honesty: When you fail to give credit for ideas that are not your own, your readers will assume that the ideas are yours. This is misleading.
• Academic Integrity: It will protect your academic career from negative consequences.
• Credibility: The citations will show your readers that your information came from reliable sources.
• Time: When you need to refer back to a source it will be easy to find.

• You use a direct quotation, even if it is in quotation marks.
• You use facts that are not common knowledge.
• You paraphrase the author’s idea(s).
• You have changed some of the author’s words (i.e., used synonyms).
• You use the key words or phrases from the author.
• You mention the author’s name in your sentence.
• You have written a sentence that mostly consists of your own thoughts, but you have made a reference to another author’s idea.

• The first line of a reference should have a normal alignment. All subsequent lines of a single reference should have a hanging indentation (indented .5 inches from the margin).

• Invert author names (last name first) and include first initials with a period following each initial.

• Include up to seven authors; for items with more than seven authors, include the first six authors' names, followed by ellipses and the final author name.

• Alphabetize references by the last name of the first author.

• Use the full journal title.

• Maintain punctuation and capitalization used by journal.

• For books, chapters, articles, and web pages, only capitalize the first letter of the first word of the title and subtitle, the word after a colon or a dash, and proper nouns. 

• Italicize book and journal titles.