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APA 7th Edition Citation Guide

In-Text: First and Subsequent Citations

How to Use This Guide

Citations in APA style include two parts: (1) in-text citations, which are connected to (2) reference list citations.

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

Note: All sources that are cited in the text must appear in the reference list at the end of the paper except for Personal Communications and similar unrecoverable sources.

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 Use – 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, it has been published in Spanish in Spain, Chile, and Uruguay" (Uribe, 2006, p. 39).

First Use – Author in Parentheses

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

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 small Latin American publisher. Publishing Research Quarterly, 22(3), 36-41. https://doi.org/0.1007/s12109-006-0023-3