APA 7th Edition: The Basics of APA In-text Citations | Scribbr 🎓

An in-text citation concisely identifies the  source of information or ideas. It helps the   readers to locate the corresponding entry in  the reference list at the end of your paper. You should include an in-text citation every  time you paraphrase or quote from a source. In this video, you’ll learn how to use  in-text citations according to the APA   Style 7th edition guidelines. I’ll  explain what information to include,   how to integrate it in a sentence, and what to  do with multiple authors and missing information.  Hi, I’m Jessica from Scribbr, here to  help you achieve your academic goals.  The in-text citation always consists of the  author’s last name and the publication year,   no matter the source type. If you're citing a specific part of a source,   also include a locator. For books,  this is usually a page number,   for videos a timestamp, and for webpages, you may use a paragraph number or heading. You only need to include the page  number when you're using a direct quote. To keep your in-text citations  correct and consistent,   you can use Scribbr’s free citation generator.  Just click, and paste, it’s that easy! Now, you can integrate the  in-text citation into a sentence   using either a parenthetical  or narrative citation. For parenthetical citations, write the author  name and publication year within parentheses.   These are usually placed at the end of  the sentence, just before the period. There is a positive correlation  between social media usage and   anxiety symptoms in teenagers (Parker, 2019). For narrative citations, the author's  name appears naturally within a sentence.   Place the publication year directly after  the author’s name, like the example here. Parker (2019) found a positive correlation   between social media usage and  anxiety symptoms in teenagers. When your source has multiple authors,  a maximum of two authors are included   in the in-text citation, if there are more  you use "et al" which means ‘and others’.  For a source with 2 authors, you use an  ampersand between them, followed by the year.   So here, it’s Harris ampersand Cook comma 2020.  When your source has 3 or more authors, simply take the first author's last   name and add “et al." comma publication year. If your institution follows the APA 6th edition,   it’s a little bit different,  you can check out this video! What if the source you’re using is missing  some key information? Let’s take a look.  If the author is unknown, but you know the  organization that created it, in this example   it’s Tesla, then you should use the organization  name.