Anthropology research guide: APA citation

You may be required to write all of your papers and presentations in this course in APA format. But, what is APA?!

APA is:

• A style manual published by the American Psychological Association
• Used in the health and social sciences
• Governs how we format our papers and ensures consistency
• Includes elements such as:
  • selection of headings, tone, and length;
  • punctuation and abbreviations;
  • presentation of numbers and statistics;
  • construction of tables and figures,
  • citation of references;
  • and many other elements that are a part of a manuscript.
• APA style refers to the physical appearance of our papers (type size, margins, running headers, tables, headings, punctuation, etc.); the way we cite our sources, both in text and in our References; and even the language we use when describing people.
• While there are similarities between MLA and APA citations, because APA is applied to different fields than MLA, the individual pieces that make up a citation are arranged differently.
• Remember than many of the Library's databases will provide an APA citation that you can copy and paste into your References page, however, you will need to correct any minor errors, and change the formatting to match that of your paper.

After you gather information from outside resources to add to your own ideas about a topic, you will quote, paraphrase, or summarize those sources within the body of your paper. Citing allows you to share with your readers where you got your information (so they can make judgments about its validity) and it protects you from any charges of plagiarism.

There are two parts to a proper citation:

1. The citation "in text" -- letting your readers know when an idea comes from someone other than yourself within the text of your paper.
2. The separate "References" page where you will list complete information about each of those sources, which comes at the end of your paper.

For this research assignment you will use APA.

Citation handouts

Here are some handouts (in both .docx and .pdf formats) featuring example citations for sources you might find through TCC's Library and the Web.

For the References page

For the In-text citations