Citation Style: APA 6th Edition: Frequently Asked Questions

A: Here are a few places you will often find authors and dates of webpages:

• Bottom of the page (scroll all the way down) - but be wary of a copyright date that is the same on every page (it's better to use n.d. for "no date" in that case).
• In the “Contact” or “About Us” sections
• Go to the root or home page.
• Keep in mind that the author could be an organization rather than a person.

Example for navigating to the root or home page:

If you are at this page: https://identify.whatbird.com/obj/617/overview/Green-tailed_Towhee.aspx

Try going to this page: https://identify.whatbird.com/

A: If you still cannot find an author, cite the resource by its title in your references list. For your in-text citation, you will use a shortened version of the title instead of the author’s last name.

See the Purdue OWL example for "Unknown Author" here.

For a source with an unknown date, use the abbreviation “n.d.” instead of the date. (It stands for “no date.”)

A: If you are directly quoting a source that is lacking page numbers, try to use some other identifier to help your reader find your original source. Heading titles, section titles, and paragraph numbers can help you identify the section of your source which you quoted.

If your source has no section or heading titles, count the paragraphs from the top to where your quote is, and use that as a paragraph number for your in-text citation. If the source is quite long, it will (hopefully) have headings, which you can use to point to a section, and then count the paragraphs down from that section to the location of your quotation.

For example:

According to Smith (1980), "The engineers’ most productive month of the year was April." (Seasonal Affective Disorder section, para. 4).

For more information, see the following sources:

• When and How to Include Page Numbers in APA Style Citations

• Purdue OWL APA 6 - Sources Without Page Numbers

A: Put all of the authors’ names on one line, in order by contribution, separated by commas, with the last author preceded by the word “and.” Or just use the word "and" in between if there are only two names.

Source and example at: APA 6 Formatting and Style Guide Guide

A: Any image you include should have a figure number and title below the image. If you did not take the photo yourself, you must include a citation for the image in a caption beneath the image.

For information on how to cite an image, see: https://www.landmark.edu/library/citation-guides/apa-citation-style-guide#Images

For more information on using Figures, Tables, and Graphs – see the following sources:

• Tables & Figures in APA Style (6th Edition) | Format & Examples

• APA 6 Tables and Figures

A: Common knowledge means that the information is generally known by professionals in the field of research you are conducting. You don’t need to cite it because you could find this same piece of information in a number of sources, therefore it is not a unique idea to any one source. This is a "gray area" of citation that falls upon the discretion of the writer. The Purdue OWL APA Guide recommends finding the information in at least five different sources before deciding it is common knowledge. When in doubt, cite the source.

For more information on Common Knowledge practices, see the following sources:

Purdue OWL - Common Knowledge & Attribution

What is Common Knowledge?

A: Quoting is when you take a portion of your source and copy it exactly word-for-word into your paper. In this case, you are taking the author’s language and tone along with his/her ideas. Quoting is best for cases when the author's phrasing is the best way to convey the idea to your reader.

Paraphrasing is when you describe someone else’s ideas using your own unique language and tone. Paraphrasing is the best way to keep the paper’s tone your own. Even though you are using your own language to convey the idea, the idea is still the author’s and must be cited.

For more info, see: Purdue Guide to Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

A: If the quotation is less than 40 words long, you can simply put quotation marks around the quote. Often times, writers will use a signal phrase to identify the author and year to begin the quote, then put the page number of the source at the end of the sentence. If you do not identify the author and year in the signal phrase, then you will need to include them at the end-of-sentence citation as you would normally do.

For example:

According to Smith (1980), "The engineers’ most productive month of the year was April." (p. 86).

If the quotation is more than 40 words long, you will need to create a block-quotation. To do this, start the quotation on a new line and left-indent it by half an inch. In this case, you will not need quotation marks. The quote will still be double-spaced and have an in-text citation at the end.

For example:

Smith’s (1980) study found that:

Seasonal affective disorder decreased the productivity of 86% of the engineers at the lab. My hypothesis is that the decreased levels of sunlight and increased indoor living caused a lack of motivation on the part of the engineers and therefore their productivity decreased. Furthermore, the engineers’ most productive month of the year was April, probably due to the fact that April is the first significantly warm month after several months of a cold and dreary winter. (p. 86)

Keep in mind that whenever you use a quotation in your paper, you must cite the page or range of pages it comes from.

For more information on using quotations, see: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/quotations/

A: If you are citing everything that comes from another source, that’s great! That means you are avoiding plagiarism. However, you want the majority of your paper to be your ideas. You don’t want to just compile other peoples’ ideas. You want to analyze and make conclusions about those other peoples’ ideas. In this way, your writing adds to the conversation on a topic so that whoever reads your paper will have a better understanding of that topic, and they will be able to add their own voice to the conversation in turn. Make sure no more than 50% of your paper is ideas from other sources.

Unfortunately, not even APA has decided what you should do in this case, so in the end it is going to be a matter of your instructor’s preference. In general, you want to keep paraphrasing to a minimum, since you don’t want the majority of your paper to be someone else’s ideas. However, sometimes it might be unavoidable, like if you need to explain something in greater detail in order to set up the rest of your paper.

The APA Style Blog tells us two things: If you put an in-text citation at the end of every sentence in your paraphrased paragraph, it’s going to look redundant. But if you only put the in-text at the end of the paragraph, it isn’t going to be clear whether the ideas you present are yours or someone else’s. I would advise you to ask your instructor, or a compromise could be this: Put the one in-text citation at the end of the paragraph where you paraphrase the ideas BUT also introduce each new idea with the person you’re referencing. For example:

In Smith’s book, Freud’s theory is explained as…

Smith goes on to state that…

Freud was also clear about…

And so on. This way, your paper won’t look redundant by having 5-6 in-text citations in each paragraph, but you’ll have covered your bases by giving credit to each idea as well. End the whole paragraph with the source you got the information from.

A "source within a source" is often referred to as a secondary source. Here are some examples:

• A book quoted in another book.
• An article paraphrased and cited in another article.
• A book paraphrased and cited in an article.
• ...And so on. Anytime a source is cited in another source, that means the source you are using counts as a secondary source for that specific piece of information.

Here is what the APA Publication Manual says about using secondary sources:

Use them as sparingly as possible – try to find the original source for where the quote or paraphrase was used (ex. the original journal article or book) However, if you have to use the secondary source (for instance if you cannot locate the original source), here is what to do:

Give the secondary source in the reference list. In the text of your main body, name the original work and give a citation for the secondary source.

For example, if Allport's work is cited in Nicholson and you did not read Allport's original work, list the Nicholson reference in the reference list.

In the text, follow this citation example:

Allport's diary (as cited in Nicholson, 2003).

For more examples, visit the following links:

• Purdue OWL's "Work Discussed in a Secondary Source"
• APA Style Website: How do you cite a source that you found in another source?
• APA Style Blog "Secondary Sources (aka How to Cite a Source You Found in Another Source)"

The APA Style Blog discusses how you would cite a famous speech in a paper, so I would use the same rule for citing a quote by a famous person. In both cases, you don’t reference the speech or quote directly- instead, you find an authoritative (reliable) source where that quote or speech is located and cite that. So for example, if you found one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches in a book about great 20th century speeches, you would cite that book in your reference list. The key is to find that quote in a reliable source—don’t just use some random website without some idea of who created it.

If you need to find a source on the web with the quote, I recommend using the Advanced Google Search to find it. Go into Advanced Google and type in keywords from the quote you want to cite in your paper. Then, under “Search within a site or domain,” specify either “.gov,” “.edu” or “.org.” (Stay away from “.com’s.”) This way, you can cite a reliable website published by an organization or an educational or governing entity. For example, I could go to www.winstonchurchill.org to try and find my quote, instead of a .com site. My citation would then be the same as citing a specific page on a website (see the Purdue OWL Example for "Nonperiodical Web Document or Report" for the proper citation example).

This one is definitely tricky. If you need to cite the results of an online test you took in a paper, do it the same as you would any other website if you took the test online. Cite it as a book if you got the test from a book, and so on. List the author as whoever issued the test -- was it an organization? Institute? Then, try to find the latest copyright date—or preferably a date that will tell you the last time the test was updated if it is online. The title is going to be whatever is listed at the top of the test or test results. Finally, put a retrieval web address for the test site, and include the date that you retrieved the test results. Here is an example for you to follow:

Enneagram Institute. (2011). Title of test results. Retrieved December 3, 2011 from
      http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/discover.asp/