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APA Citation Style Guide (6th Edition): In-text: First and Subsequent Citations

This APA Citation Style Guide provides practical advice for citing sources, following the guidelines set forth in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th Edition).

How to Use This Guide

Citations are a two part system: in-text citations connected to reference list citations.

This guide will help you create in-text citations that correlate with the corresponding Reference list citations. Please see the References guide for more details on the Reference list.

First and Subsequent Citations

In-text citations generally require you to provide Author, Date, and Location (i.e. page numbers) when you first reference a document in your writing. Subsequent references/citations do not always require all of this information.  Follow these basic guidelines for handling subsequent citations.

First Citation- Author in the Sentence:

If you first cite a source in the text of a sentence, you do not need to include the Date in any subsequent citations that are also in the text of the sentence. You should include the Date if you later cite the document in parentheses.

Example:

Publisher for the independent Ediciones Era, Marcelo Uribe (2006) claims that many small Spanish language publishers prefer to maintain extended backlists of older material, for the betterment of Spanish language literature and the careers of its authors. In one example, Uribe discusses a situation where his company published the work of a short story author that did not sell successfully during its first print run but later came to be a resource for many Mexican newspapers because of its backlist availability (p. 39). "Currently, the book is in its third printing, it has been translated into French, English, and Portuguese, and, apart from Mexico, is has been published in Spanish in Spain, Chile, and Uruguay" (Uribe, 2006, p. 39).  

First Citation- Author in Parentheses: 

If you first cite a source in parentheses, you must provide a full citation for all subsequent citaitons.

Example:

Many large Spanish language publishing companies have eliminated their backlist selections for greater profit, cutting the lifespan of books down to months instead of years (Uribe, 2006, p.36). Backlists allow books to stay in print over long periods of time before the publishers dispose of them. According to Uribe (2006), once a book published by a large company has decreased its sales, the book is put out of print (p. 36).  "Corporate [publishing] houses only publish to have a book in the market for a few months and they take advantage of the sales curve brought by the book's release, and then they make haste to take it off their list" (Uribe, 2006, p. 39).

Uribe, M. (2006). Perspectives of a smail Latin American publisher. Publishing Research Quarterly, 22(3), 36-41. Retrieved from http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/journal/12109 

APA Manual pp.174-175, Sections 6.11 & 6.12

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