In-text Citations

You must include in-text citations next to EVERY item of information from a source.  A source can be any text, video, or podcast that you took information from.

An in-text citation tells the reader the author’s last name and the publication year. You also need to include a page number (or paragraph number if your document doesn’t have pages) or a time-stamp (if your information came from a video or podcast) to tell your reader exactly where in the source the information is from.  You must put these citations next to EVERY item of information from a source.

If you don’t have an author, or if you don’t know the year of publication, don’t worry – you can still cite your source. Your APA manual explains these issues in detail.

If you use information from a source and you do not include a citation, you have committed an act of academic dishonesty called plagiarism. Please review Confederation College’s “Academic Integrity Policy” and the “Student Charter of Rights and Responsibilities”. Plagiarism is a serious offence which is discussed in more detail in the chapter on Academic Integrity.

Quoting, Paraphrasing, Patchwriting, and Plagiarism

There are two acceptable ways to include information from a source: direct quoting and paraphrasing. Both directly quoted and paraphrased information needs to be cited.

If you directly quote some information from a source, you need to put the author’s words in “quotation marks.” These “quotation marks” show that you have borrowed the author’s words as well as their ideas or information. If you copy information and do not use quotation marks, you have committed plagiarism even if you include a citation.  To learn more about direct quoting, review the Direct Quoting chapter of this e-text.

While it can be effective to use some direct quotes, most professors expect students to paraphrase the majority of the information they provide. When you paraphrase information, you put that information into your own words. By restating the information, you demonstrate to your professor that you have a strong understanding of the content of the original.  When you paraphrase information, you must be sure to fully rewrite the information; changing just a few words is insufficient and is called patchwriting which is a form of plagiarism.  Do not put paraphrased information into quotation marks but do include a citation. If you do not include a citation with paraphrased information, you have committed plagiarism.

To learn more about paraphrasing, review the Paraphrasing and Paraphrasing vs. Patchwriting chapters of this e-text.

Narrative and Parenthetical Style Citations

There are two ways to include an in-text citation: parenthetical style and narrative style. 

In the parenthetical style, all three pieces of citation information (author, date, location) are placed in parentheses (brackets) at the end of the sentence, just before the final period.

In the narrative style, the three pieces of information are still present, but they are not placed together. The author (or the organization functioning as the author) is part of the sentence, so it is not in parentheses. The date always must be placed next to the author, and the location (page or paragraph number) must be placed at the end of the sentence, just before the final period.

Notice that APA narrative style generally requires the use of past tense verbs to introduce quotes or paraphrases. Check out this list of appropriate  words that you can use.

If you are citing the same source multiple times in one paragraph, consider using the narrative style first to introduce the source and using the parenthetical style for each subsequent citation:

Statistics Canada (2020) reported that approximately one fifth of immigrants to Canada are over-qualified for the jobs they obtain in this country (para. 2). One reason for this level of over-qualification is that many immigrant workers were only available to work at part-time employment and so were not available to work in their professional fields (Statistics Canada, 2020, para. 4).