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Click below to see an example APA paper with tips for document formatting.
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the leading professional organization in the US that promotes advancement in the psychology field. APA offers a variety of resources, publications, and standards for research, writing, and professional practice.
Students often encounter APA when asked to complete academic writing assignments in APA style, which is frequently utilized across disciplines such as business, healthcare and nursing, informatics and IT, social work, and many others.
To learn more about APA as an organization and as a style guide, visit these official APA webpages:
Writers use in-text citations (sometimes called parenthetical citations) to give credit to quoted, paraphrased, or summarized source material. In APA style, there are three required pieces of information to include in an in-text citation:
How these pieces of information are formatted in an essay depends on whether or not the writer uses a signal phrase to introduce the upcoming source, as shown in the examples below.
| Signal Phrase Introducing Source | No Signal Phrase Introducing Source |
|---|---|
| Carr (2017) argues, "We need to give our minds more room to think" (p. 426). | It's argued that people "need to give [their] minds more room to think" (Carr, 2017, p. 426). |
To learn more about formatting APA in-text citations in your writing, visit these highly respected websites:
The References page, which is an alphabetical list of all sources that are cited throughout your essay, will be the last page of your paper.
APA style has specific guidelines for how to format each type of source on your References page. It's not necessary to memorize each unique format as long as you know where to locate their guidelines.
To learn how to format APA reference entries for different types of sources, visit these highly respected websites:
