APA

 1. Identify what the source is, where it's from, and who it's by.

Is it a book? A journal article? An interview? Did you access it online? How many authors does it have? The source's characteristics influence how to reference it.

Say for instance you need to reference a journal article that you found online, such as in Figure 1. Figure 1 shows the information that is at the top of the first page of the article. This information tells you that it is an article from a journal, and that there are five authors.

2. Find a matching example in your style guide.

The aim is to find the closest example possible in your chosen APA style guide. For the following examples, we're using the Monash APA style guide.

In the style guide, you can find examples for an online journal article that is written by two to seven authors, as in Figure 2. Note that reference list entries in APA use a hanging indent. This is where the second and subsequent lines of the entry are indented. You can select hanging indent in the paragraph options of your document.

3. Write out the reference following the style guide examples.

Your aim at this point is to make the information that you have match the order and formatting of the information from the style guide. This includes the details such as punctuation. If you're ever unsure, remember that your markers care most of all about consistency and having enough information to be able to locate the source themselves. Check over your references to make sure they're following the same principles and formatting.

Author names

First, you need to identify all the authors' surnames (also known as their last name, or family name). In this case they are Keller, Murphy, Prior, DaCosta, and Schmidt. Then, you need to work out the authors' first name initials, and write the initials after each author's surname:

Keller, S. C., Murphy, S., Prior, S., DaCosta, G., & Schmidt, B.

Article and journal title

Then comes the year of publication in parentheses, the article title and the journal name (in italics), as in Figure 3.

Publication details

After that, you need the volume number and, if available, the issue number. You will also need the page range. Sometimes you may need to look elsewhere in the article or on the journal's website to find out these details.

Finally, if you found the article online, you have a couple of options. Look to see if the article has a DOI-a Digital Object Identifier. This is like a stable URL. If so, then according to the Monash style guide, you will put the DOI after the page range.

A finished reference

Following the above steps, Figure 4 is what your reference list entry will look like.

In-text citations

When you use APA, you need to use parenthetical citations in the body of your work to show where the information comes from. Monash's APA guide provides information on how many authors' names to include.

Three or more authors example

For the example we used earlier, note that since we have five authors, you will need to give only the first author's surname, followed by et al. Include page numbers in your citations whenever you use quotes, specific data or a close paraphrase. For the example we have been using, you could write:

Keller et al. (2008, p. 852) show that ...

Research by Keller et al. (2008, p. 854) explains ...

If you are summarising the main idea of the whole article, you don't need a page number.

Check your guide

Always remember to have your chosen style guide open while you are referencing-even if you use referencing software. It's useful to look out for inconsistencies, and to make sure that you have all the right information in the correct order and format. Check out the style guides listed above.