APA In-Text Citation: Rules, Examples, and Edge Cases

The rules below follow the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020). Where instructors commonly add their own requirements, I say so.

The basic pattern

APA uses an author-date system. There are two ways to place a citation in a sentence, and you should use both across a paper rather than one exclusively.

Parenthetical citation. The author and year appear together in parentheses, separated by a comma, usually at the end of the sentence and before the period.

Students who handwrite lecture notes retain more conceptual detail (Marchetti, 2021).

Narrative citation. The author’s name is part of the sentence, and only the year goes in parentheses, immediately after the name.

Marchetti (2021) found that students who handwrite lecture notes retain more conceptual detail.

Both forms point to the same reference entry, which begins “Marchetti, L. (2021).” The citation contains no first names, no initials (with one exception, below), no title, and no publisher.

For a direct quotation, add the page number after the year, using “p.” for one page and “pp.” for a range:

Handwriting "forces the note-taker to compress ideas rather than transcribe them" (Marchetti, 2021, p. 44).

Marchetti (2021) argued that handwriting "forces the note-taker to compress ideas" (p. 44).

Notice that in the narrative version, the page number gets its own parentheses at the end of the quote, while the year stays with the name. That split is the single detail students get wrong most often once they know the basic rule.

If you are still deciding how APA fits into the larger structure of your paper, How to Format a Research Paper in APA Style covers margins, spacing, and section order, and APA Title Page covers the first page.

Number of authors

The number of authors determines how the citation is written. The table applies to both parenthetical and narrative forms; in narrative form, replace the ampersand with the word “and.”

Three points on this table.

First, the sixth edition rule that made you list up to five authors the first time is gone. In APA 7, three or more authors are shortened to the first surname plus “et al.” from the very first citation. “Et al.” takes a period after “al” and no italics.

Second, the ampersand belongs only inside parentheses. Writing “Marchetti & Osei (2021) found” in running text is an error; writing “(Marchetti and Osei, 2021)” is the mirror-image error.

Third, abbreviate a group author only if the abbreviation is well known or will appear at least three times in the paper. Define it once, then use it. If the group name is short or appears only once, spell it out every time.

Missing pieces: no author, no date, no page

Sources from the web are where the basic pattern breaks down, so APA has a fallback for each missing element.

No author. Move the title into the author position. Use the first few words of the title, in title case. Italicize the title if the work stands alone (a book, a report, a whole webpage or website); put it in double quotation marks if the work is part of something larger (an article, a chapter, a page on a site with other pages).

(Guide to Community Composting, 2022)          — a standalone report
("Why Backyard Bins Fail," 2022)               — a short article on a news site

Do not write “Anonymous” unless the work is actually signed that way.

No date. Use “n.d.” in place of the year, with a comma before it and periods after both letters.

(Okonkwo, n.d.)
Okonkwo (n.d.) described the survey as informal.

No page numbers. For a direct quote from a source without pages, give the reader another way to locate the passage. In order of preference:

• a paragraph number counted by you: (Okonkwo, 2020, para. 6)
• a section heading plus the paragraph within it: (Okonkwo, 2020, Methods section, para. 2)
• a timestamp for audio or video: (Halvorsen, 2023, 12:40)
• for classical religious or literary texts, the standard division: (King Lear, 1606/2008, 3.2.15)

Shorten a long heading in quotation marks: (Okonkwo, 2020, “Limits of the Survey” section). Never invent page numbers from a printed PDF that lacks them, and never use the page numbers your browser assigns when you print a webpage.

Same author, same year, same surname

Three situations produce citations that would otherwise be identical.

One author, two works in the same year. Add lowercase letters to the year, assigned in the order the works appear in the reference list (which is alphabetical by title). Use the letters in every citation of those works.

(Marchetti, 2021a)   (Marchetti, 2021b)
Marchetti (2021a, 2021b) reported different retention rates in the two studies.

For undated works this becomes n.d.-a and n.d.-b, with a hyphen.

Different authors, same surname. Add initials to both, even if the years differ, so the reader knows the two are not the same person.

(J. Marchetti, 2021)   (R. Marchetti, 2018)

This is the only case where initials appear in an in-text citation.

Same author group whose short forms collide. See the FAQ at the bottom for the rule on distinguishing “et al.” citations.

Several sources in one place

When one sentence draws on more than one source, list them all in a single set of parentheses, separated by semicolons, in the same order they appear in the reference list (alphabetical by first author).

Note-taking by hand improves retention across several study designs (Adebayo & Kim, 2020; Marchetti, 2021; NRC, 2019).

Works by the same author are grouped together with the years in order, separated by commas: (Marchetti, 2019, 2021a, 2021b). If you want to draw attention to one source before the others, you may put it first and introduce the rest with “see also”: (Marchetti, 2021; see also Adebayo & Kim, 2020).

In narrative form, there is no required order; write the sentence in whatever order reads best.

Quotations: short and long

A quotation of fewer than 40 words runs inside your sentence with double quotation marks, and the citation sits after the closing quotation mark but before the period.

A quotation of 40 words or more becomes a block quotation. Start it on a new line, indent the whole block half an inch from the left margin, drop the quotation marks, keep double spacing, and place the citation after the final punctuation, with no period after the parentheses.

Marchetti (2021) summarized the pattern across three semesters:

     Students who typed their notes reproduced the lecturer's phrasing
     almost word for word and could recall it for about a day. Students
     who wrote by hand recorded fewer words but, when tested a week
     later, could explain the underlying ideas in their own terms. (p. 51)

If you have not introduced the author before the block, put the full citation at the end: (Marchetti, 2021, p. 51). For guidance on when a quote earns its place at all and how to weave it into an argument, see How to Use Quotes in an Essay Without Losing Your Own Voice.

Less common cases you will still meet

A source you read about in another source. APA calls this a secondary source and asks you to find and cite the original whenever you can. When you cannot, cite the original in the sentence and the source you actually read in parentheses, and list only the source you read in the references.

Bellweather's early field notes (as cited in Marchetti, 2021) describe the same effect.

Personal communications. Emails, private messages, interviews you conducted, unrecorded lectures, and similar unrecoverable sources are cited in text only, with initials and surname, and never appear in the reference list.

(T. Nakamura, personal communication, March 3, 2026)

A republished or translated work. Give both years, original first, separated by a slash: (Ferreira, 1931/2019).

Part of a source other than a page. You may cite a chapter, table, figure, or slide directly: (Marchetti, 2021, Chapter 4), (Marchetti, 2021, Table 2).

Legal materials and interviews with research participants. Both follow special rules that are outside the scope of this guide; check the manual’s chapters on legal references and on protecting participants, and ask your instructor.

A worked paragraph

Here is a short body paragraph from a fictional paper on note-taking, with the citations in place. Every source is invented for the example.

The effect of handwriting on retention is well documented but unevenly explained. Marchetti (2021) attributed it to compression, arguing that “the hand cannot keep up with the voice, so the mind must decide what matters” (p. 44). Later studies found the same advantage but located it elsewhere: in the physical act of forming letters (Adebayo & Kim, 2020) or in the slower pace of review afterward (Sørensen et al., 2023). The National Reading Council (NRC, 2019) has treated all three explanations as compatible, and its guidance for instructors leaves the mechanism open. One much-cited early account, by contrast, offered no mechanism at all and simply reported the difference (Bellweather, as cited in Marchetti, 2021). Whatever the cause, the practical advice has been stable for a decade: students should take notes by hand when the material is conceptual (Adebayo & Kim, 2020; Marchetti, 2021; NRC, 2019).

Six citations, four forms: narrative with a page, parenthetical with two authors, “et al.” from the first mention, a group author with its abbreviation defined, a secondary source, and a multi-source list in alphabetical order.

Common mistakes

Graders see the same handful of errors on almost every APA paper.

1. A citation in the text with no reference entry, or the reverse. Every in-text citation must lead somewhere; every reference entry must be cited at least once. Check them against each other before you submit.
2. The page number attached to a paraphrase but missing from a quote. It is the quote that requires the page.
3. “et al.” on a two-author source. Two authors are always both named.
4. A comma between author and year missing, or a period inside the parentheses. Write (Marchetti, 2021). with the sentence’s period after the closing parenthesis.
5. The year repeated on every mention in a paragraph after a narrative citation. Permitted, but not required, and it makes the prose clunky.
6. First names, credentials, or titles in the citation. “Dr. Lena Marchetti (2021)” is not APA. Surname only.
7. Citing a whole book for a specific claim. If you quote or draw on a particular passage, give the page; do not make the reader search 300 pages.
8. Citation placed after the period. The citation is part of the sentence, so the period comes last.

Accidental plagiarism usually starts as a citation error rather than an intent to deceive; How to Avoid Accidental Plagiarism in Your Essays works through the gray areas.

Quick checklist

Before you submit, run down this list.

• Every citation has a surname (or title if no author) and a year (or n.d.).
• Every direct quote has a page, paragraph, section, or timestamp.
• Three or more authors are shortened to “et al.” from the first citation.
• Ampersand inside parentheses, “and” in the sentence.
• Group author abbreviations are defined on first use.
• Multiple sources in one parenthesis are alphabetical and separated by semicolons.
• Same author, same year: letters added to the year, matching the reference list.
• Same surname, different authors: initials added.
• Block quotes for 40 words or more, citation after the final punctuation.
• Personal communications cited in text only.
• Every in-text citation matches a reference entry, and vice versa.

Where your instructor’s rules differ from the manual, follow the instructor; where they are silent, follow the manual. The point of a citation is to be found, and consistency does more for that than any single rule.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a page number when I paraphrase in APA?

No. APA 7 requires a page or location only for direct quotations. For a paraphrase, the author and year are enough. That said, the manual encourages adding a page number when it would help a reader find the passage in a long book or report, and many instructors ask for it. If your syllabus says to include pages for paraphrases, do it.

How do I cite the same source several times in one paragraph?

Give the full citation the first time. If you then name the author in the sentence itself (a narrative citation), you may leave out the year for the rest of that paragraph as long as no other work by that author could be confused with it. Every parenthetical citation, though, still needs the year. When a new paragraph starts, cite in full again.

What do I do when two sources shorten to the same et al. form?

Add as many surnames as needed to tell them apart, then finish with et al. Two 2022 papers by Reyes, Okafor, Lindqvist, and Tan and by Reyes, Okafor, Brandt, and Ma would both become Reyes et al. (2022), so write Reyes, Okafor, Lindqvist, et al. (2022) and Reyes, Okafor, Brandt, et al. (2022). The reference list keeps the full author lists.

Can I cite a whole website or a lecture in APA text?

A general mention of a website you are not quoting from can be handled in the sentence with the URL in parentheses and no reference entry. A class lecture that is not recoverable by readers is treated as a personal communication: cite it in text only, with the instructor’s initials and surname, the words “personal communication,” and the exact date, and leave it out of the reference list.