When preparing papers and presentations, citations (or references) should be included to provide authority to the ideas and information you are including. It is important to give credit where it is due and also allow your reader or audience to verify the information you are providing.
Citations should be put in:
The format for including these citations will vary depending on your chosen style. Psychology often uses APA (American Psychological Association) formatting, though other classes may include styles such as ASA, Chicago, MLA, or a journal-specific style.
Citations can be generated for a given article or book by the library catalogue, as well as in APA PsycARTICLES and other databases.
The library also has the APA Style Guide on reserve so that you can refer to it for all of your citation needs.
In-text citations in APA (American Psychological Association) style use the author last name and year to identify the source of the information. The in-text citation is put in parentheses as part of a sentence in your work.
If there are 2 authors use "and" between their last names in your in-text citation. If there are more than 2 authors, use the first author's last name, then "et al." before adding the date.
Example:
Children have a greater ability than adults to separate their moral concern for another from other factors (Neldner et al., 2023).
In APA style your reference list should be arranged alphabetically by the last name of the first author for each article or other resource you have referenced in-text in your work.
The library catalogue and some databases are able to create APA references for you, but make sure you check the result, especially after copying and pasting it into your reference section!
The format for referencing an article in APA style is:
Surname, Initials, & Surname, Initials. (Year). Article Title. Journal Name, Volume(issue), page range. DOI if available.
Example:
Neldner, K., Wilks, M., Crimston, C. R., Jaymes, R. W. M., & Nielsen, M. (2023). I may not like you, but I still care: Children differentiate moral concern from other constructs. Developmental Psychology, 59(3), 549–566. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001485.supp (Supplemental)
If you're referencing an item in a research paper or assignment, you'll need to include a citation to it in your Bibliography, Works Cited, or Reference List. Your instructor may require these citations be formatted in a particular style. The citation tool is useful for generating a citation in a variety of citation styles:
Click the citation button, choose your preferred citation style from the list, and then click the copy the citation to clipboard button:
