Most APA citations have two parts:
In-text citations should have:
There are two ways to do in-text citations:
Parenthetical citations – all citation information is in parentheses
Ex. Some studies have found that students with disabilities are not always encouraged to go to college (Elmore, Veitch, & Harbor, 2018).
Narrative citations – citation information is split up
Ex. Elmore, Veitch, and Harbor (2018) found that students with disabilities are not always encouraged to go to college.
General rules for in-text citations:
Most things in reference list citations should be lowercase - the exceptions are:
Masta (2018) notes that participants in her study were "most at ease interacting with other Native American students" (p. 29).
Masta, S. (2018). Strategy and resistance: How Native American students engage in accommodation in mainstream schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 49(1), 21-35.
Note: The general format for article citations is:
Lederman (2018) notes that although OER can save students money, in many cases, "the institution itself is picking up the costs that were formally borne by the students, through some combination of direct subsidies to instructors to create the content and a loss of textbook revenue to a campus store, among other costs".
Note: In most cases, websites don't have page numbers, so you'll leave them off.
Lederman, D. (2018, July 25). Calculating (and acknowledging) the costs of OER. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/07/25/community-college-confronts-costs-open-educational-resources
Note: The general format for website citations is:
What I've shared above has the very basics, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about how to deal with things like multiple authors. Here are some other resources to help you out:
Most library databases provide you with a citation for their articles. They are usually mostly correct. It's more common that there are problems with the citations, usually having to do with capitalization and author names.
Here's an example from the Education Source database:
In the citation, most of the words in the article title are capitalized, which is not correct.
Note: the journal in this example has a volume number, but no issue number. This is becoming more common as more journals become online-only!
When putting together a reference list in APA style, the first line should be normal, but all other lines should be indented. This is called a hanging indent. Here's how you can do it.