APA Citation Guidelines (7th Edition): FAQ

Both parenthetical and narrative citation styles are acceptable to use in APA papers. You can choose one citation style to use or use a combination of both in your writing. Tip: Read the sentence or paragraph you are citing. Does it have better flow with a narrative or parenthetical citation?

Parenthetical citations include the author name and publication date in parentheses at the end of the sentence or paragraph. All grass is green grass

• (Author last name, year of publication).

Narrative citations integrate the author name into the text with a signal phrase and include the year in parentheses at the end of the sentence or paragraph.

• According to Harper, all grass is green grass (year of publication).

In this case, you will have to adapt your citations. See the Missing Reference Information table.

If the author of a website is not easily identifiable, check the bottom of the website or the "About" section. If the author is still not found, use the website's title for both the in-text and reference list citations.

Websites might have two dates: 1. the copyright and 2. the date the cite was last updated. Use the date the cite was last updated for both in-text and reference list citations if it is available. This is usually found at the bottom of the website or in the “About” section.

For sources without page numbers, use alternative identifiers like headings, section titles, paragraph numbers, or time stamps for in-text citations. Common sources without page numbers include websites, online magazines, films, and eBooks.

For more information see Direct Quotation of Material Without Page Numbers.

Assign a lower case letter (a,b,c) after the year of publication to distinguish between the two works. Use these letters in both the in-text and reference list citations.

For more information see Citing works with the Same Author and Date.

Citations created with citation generators can be helpful, but they often have mistakes on capitalization, punctuation, and italicization (some instructors are very strict on correct citations). Double-check any citation you copy and paste from a citation generator with an example from the library website.

Note: This includes the citation generator tools on EBSCO and Gale Databases.