The APA (American Psychological Association) Referencing System

What is Referencing?

Referencing is a system that allows you to acknowledge the contributions and work of others in your writing. Whenever you use any words, ideas or information from any source in your written work, you must reference those sources. If you do not reference your sources you may be charged with ‘plagiarism’ and your work can be failed.

This guide presents an introduction to the APA style (5th edition). There are other similar styles (eg. Harvard) that other courses and lecturers may require. Once you master the APA style, you will have the skill and patience to learn and use other referencing styles when required. APA style requires references both in-text and in a list of references.

1. In-text Citations

Three important pieces of information about the source are included in the body of your text.

• The surname of the author or authors
• The year of publication of the information
• The page number (if the information can be located on a particular page).

Citations may be placed at the end of a sentence (before the concluding punctuation) in brackets:

Paraphrase or Summary of the Source (in your own words)

Encouraging students to memorise facts and rules and then testing their memory has been a consistent criterion of pedagogy (Broudy, 1998, p. 8).

Broudy (1998) explains that memorisation does not result in an ability to solve problems (p.8).

Quotation (exact words from the source)

Broudy (1998) believes that “on the common criteria for schooling, our sample citizen has failed because he cannot replicate the necessary skill or apply the relevant principles” (p. 9).

An example of a paragraph using the APA Style is given in Figure 1. Note the conventions for acknowledging that the information within the figure (or table or image) is from another source.

An example of how to incorporate a long quotation (40 words or more) is given in Figure 2. Note that the long quotation is indented at the left margin.