The Best Study Guide on APA Format Citation

APA is a style that is commonly used in citing sources especially in social sciences. It is very important to know what is APA style citations, considering they help readers to know where exactly an idea of a research originated. APA in full stands for American Psychological Association, who first discovered this style.

Understanding APA style is important to becoming a good writer, especially when compared to Harvard University and British Standard Style. This article will serve to help you achieve just that. In order to understand APA format citation you have to first understand how it is used. It is a well understood fact that citations are conjoined in a sentence or a paragraph in order for the reader to understand what is being quoted or who is the source of certain information.

However, the APA format for citations entails some facts you need to consider in terms of rules, which included in text citations and a complete reference list. This two have to be used jointly always. In the case of APA format for citations, there can be a number of forms present in the body of the text. This includes direct quotations and paraphrasing. When paraphrasing is used by a researcher he aims to prove his ideas or the information he wants to cite are from an authentic source. However, proper care should be taken, when paraphrasing to prevent cases where some citations can be considered plagiarized work.

Never forget to use identical wording from your source, when you are quoting a sources because they need to be accurate to hold some weight. But in the case you want to omit some word, consider using three ellipses to show the omissions. Footnotes and in text citations are the most recommended when citing quoted materials, howeverm in APA style formatting these two are discouraged as they tend to be expensive to be reproduced by publishers.

Another fact that you should always remember when it comes to APA citation formatting is that the body results from sources like:

- one author,

- corporate authors,

- anonymous author,

- several other numbers of authors.

For single author, in text citations must always capture his last name and year of issue, but never his title or suffixes like Dr or Prof., this is how it should look like: William (2015).

In the case of two authors, their last names are included in the citation with the year of issue like in this example: David and Kennedy (2010) suggested that juicing helps with weight loss.

In the case of several writers, only the first author’s last name is considered followed with a “et al” and the year it was issued. Example: would look like David et al (2010) suggested juicing helps with weight loss.

Any work without identified author have their citation determined by first few words of the reference list while for cooperate authors names of groups that have identified as authors are used in text citations and researchers can have their names abbreviated.