Brief Description of APA Academic Format

Author First

If the author is a person, provide the last name first, followed by the first name and middle initial (if available). All additional author names should be documented last name first as well. However, authors are not always people. An author may be a department of the government, such as the Internal Revenue Service, or an organization or a company. If the name of the person who penned the document is not available, consider next the entity that paid the person who penned it as the author. In some cases there may be no reasonable way to determine who is responsible for the document. Skip the author in these instances and proceed to the name of the publication. However, before including a source without a definite author in a paper, contact the professor of the class to see whether he will accept that source as an authority on the subject of the paper.

After the author comes the name of the document. In the case of a book, it's simply the book title (underlined). If it's a section of a book or an article in a periodical, the name of the section or article comes before the larger publication in which it appears. A section or article name appears without quotation marks. The APA style does not use quotation marks at all.

There generally are three kinds of numbers in citations: publication date, edition or volume, and page numbers. They appear in citations in that order. Specifically, the publication date comes directly after the author and is placed in parentheses. Edition or volume numbers come directly after a book title and are also placed in parentheses. For periodicals, any issue or volume number is included as part of the underlined title, separated from the title by a comma. Page numbers for a book section are given in parentheses after the title of a book. Page numbers for a periodical, by contrast, are given at the very end of the citation without parentheses.

This overview of the APA citation style provides students with a general idea of what needs to be included and where it goes. However, this article provides only basic citation information. Before handing in a paper, consult either a hard copy of a writer's reference manual or visit the APA Style website. Be sure you have cited your reference correctly for the type of reference it is: book, periodical, online or electronic source. Students receive little sympathy from professors for incorrect citations.