In-text citations appear in the body of your paper. In-text citations are a notation within or at the end of the sentence to signal to the reader that a portion of the sentence contains material from another source. It also directs the reader to the corresponding reference (bibliography entry). 

In the example below, the in-text citation is highlighted. Notice how APA uses an author, year format for their in-text citations.

References are full citations that contain all the necessary attributing information from the source you use. These citation entries are listed on their own page at the end of your paper. In other styles, this may be called a Bibliography or Works Cited.

In the example below, see how additional information beyond the author's last name and year of publication are included. We also include the author's first and second initials, the title of the work, and the publisher. This allows your reader to look up the exact source you used. It also attributes the information to other important collaborators, such as publishers and editors. 

A parenthetical citation means you have used your own words to describe an idea through paraphrase or summary. Parenthetical citations go at the end of a sentence and are formatted as (author, year). Notice the author and year are separated by a comma and placed within parenthesis. Also note the sentence's ending punctuation comes after the parenthetical citation.

In a narrative citation, you are still using your own words to describe someone else's idea, but you have also used the author's name in the sentence. Because you have already stated the author's name, you don't need to repeat it in the citation. However, you will still follow the basic format of author and year, so the year will be placed in parenthesis directly after the author's name.

A direct quote means copying word-for-word what another person wrote. A direct quote should use quotation marks. The citation will come after the closing quotation mark, but before the ending punctuation. For a direct quote, include the page number after the year. See how in the example the citation follows the format of (author, year, p. number). There are commas separating each element within the citation, and the page number is notated with "p.". 

If there are no page numbers available in the source you are using, include the paragraph number instead. The paragraph numbers is notated with "para.".

If you are quoting an audio source, you will need to provide the time stamp in your citation. The example below shows the hour, minutes, and seconds separated by colons. 

If there are two authors for your source, include both authors' last names in your citation. For the parenthetical and direct quote citations, you will separate their names using the ampersand symbol: &

List the authors in both your references and in-text citations in the same order as they are listed in the original source.

If there are three or more authors, you will list each name in your reference entry, with an ampersand before the final name (&). Note that commas are used between each author and the period after their initials are still used, resulting in a period followed immediately by a comma.

The in-text citations for three or more authors, however, will not list every author's name. Instead, you will list the first author's name followed by "et al."