Common Citation Styles 2: APA

Every time you use someone else’s work, either through quoting, summarizing or paraphrasing, you need to credit the original author or creator by using special citation styles.

This can be done by different citation styles due to the differences in the types of academic disciplines and majors.

There are several different ways to cite a source in academic writing:

• MLA is commonly used in the humanities.
• APA is commonly used in psychology and education.
• Chicago A (notes and bibliography) is commonly used in history.
• Chicago B (author-date) is commonly used in the sciences.

As discussed in the previous article published here, MLA is one of the most common referencing styles developed by the American Language Association. This method is often used in the Humanities and focuses on language and literature. MLA style is a system for documenting sources in scholarly writing.

APA Citation Style

However, the APA (American Psychological Association) is the most common and wildly-used citation style in the world to list and introduce biographical sources or references in academic writing, other well-known citation styles include MLA and Chicago. APA is used in Education, Psychology, and Sciences and is an author-date style.

Major components of MLA style

In-text citation

According to Scribbr, “this is the brief citation included in the sentence where the information is used. The in-text citation only contains the author’s last name and year of publication, e.g. (Smith, 2019). It identifies and helps locate the full source in the reference list.”

• An earlier study in which X and Y were compared revealed that … (Smith, 2017).
• Smith (2017) shows how, in the past, research into X was mainly concerned with …
• In 1984, research was carried out by Smith that indicated that …

Reference list entry

This is the full publication details listed alphabetically on the reference page, which appears right after the main body.

Based on the type of source you’re citing, i.e., website citation, a book citation, a journal article citation, and lecture citation the format will differ, but every reference starts the same:

Book citations

Journal article citations

Website citations

Report citations

Why APA is the most popular citation style?

The reasons that make the APA the most popular and wildly-used style to other reference methods are as follows:

– It is introduced by the American Psychological Association (APA);

– It has been accepted by many internationally accredited journals and scientific societies;

– It is constantly reviewed and monitored;

– It is compatible with many scientific resource management software such as EndNote;

– It is accepted by many scientific databases and can be obtained when searching for information.

Please check out our previous article about MLA citation style.