If you wish to include this quote in your writing, as it is based on a source (the article in question), you need to put an in-text reference in your writing and must include that source in your reference list. The way in which you write an in-text reference, as well as the way in which you create a reference list, both depend on the referencing style you employ. We first focus on APA Style (7th Edition).

 

In APA Style, in-text referencing is done through placing a citation in your text at the spot where your writing is based on the source in question. A citation takes the form of a small ‘tag’ – a small amount of necessary information, written between brackets. A citation generally consists of three elements:

1. The last name(s) of the source’s author(s). In APA Style, both last names are included if a source has two authors (i.e. ‘Johnson & McCree’). If a source has three or more authors, only the first author’s name plus ‘et al.’, Latin for ‘and others’, need be given (i.e. ‘Johnson et al.’)

2. The source’s year of publication. Even if more specific information is available to you, you only include the year in your citation. Details can be included in the reference list if needed.

3. If applicable: The specific page number(s) which contain the information you used. In general, if page numbers are available to you, you should always include them in your citation. However, sometimes you’ll find that your source does not include page numbers (this is often the case for websites, for instance). In that case, the page number(s) can be omitted. But if they’re listed in your source, you should list them in your citation!

 

Let’s break down the citation step-by-step using the article on Netflix listed above. First, looking at the article’s second page, you can find that the author is Ms. Patty McCord. Second, on the same page it is listed that the article was published in the JAN-FEB issue of Harvard Business Review in 2014. Third, the above-mentioned passage can be found on page one. As such, your three-step tag becomes:

           

(McCord, 2014, p. 1)

 

Now imagine that rather than include a direct quote, you instead paraphrase information that can be found on pages 1 through 4 of McCord’s article. In this case, you refer not to a single page, but to multiple pages at once. Then you would write the citation with ‘pp.’ rather than ‘p.’ – as follows:

 

(McCord, 2014, pp. 1-4)

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For books and (academic) articles, it is usually easy to find the information you need to create your tag. It is not uncommon however – especially with online content – for it to be unclear who the author of a specific source is, or when said source was published. When it is unclear who the author of a source is, you can substitute the first part of your citation with the words ‘unknown author’. A commonly accepted alternative employed for online content is to list the name of the website which contains the webpage you used as a source. For example:

 

(Unknown author, 2001)         (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2001)

 

When it is unclear what the date of publication of a source is, you can substitute the second part of your citation with the abbreviation ‘n.d.’, which stands for ‘no date’. For online content, you may substitute the date of publication with the date a webpage was last edited instead if this information is available. If this is not explicitly clear, you may instead list the present year – as you are using the source as it is published to you at that exact time. For example:

 

(NASA, n.d.)                           (Buzzfeed, 2022)

 

A final point to mention is that when you include information which would normally be included in your citation in your writing instead, you needn’t repeat those details in the citation itself. For example:

 

In his book The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien (1954, p. 17) writes that…

As Tolkien wrote in his 1954 book The Fellowship of the Ring (p. 17)…

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See below for a short paragraph which includes several in-text citations in APA Style. Make sure to examine the placement of the citations and examine the linked web sources to discover how and why these citations have been listed the way they have.