Citations and APA Style

When writing an academic paper, you often need to refer to other people’s research and ideas to support your own arguments and ideas. When you engage in academic writing, you are contributing to an ongoing conversation, so it is important to give credit to other researchers’ contributions. This is why when you refer to other researchers’ work, you should cite the sources you consulted.   

Citing means referring to ideas from other authors’ works and providing enough information about these external sources (e.g., author’s name and when the source was published) so that readers can locate them in the reference list at the end of your paper. 

Before you learn how to cite, you need to know what a citation style is and which style you should use. A citation style is a set of rules on how to cite (e.g., type and order of information that should be included, formatting, punctuation). There are various citation styles (e.g., Chicago, Modern Language Association). You can find information and guides for different citation styles from Citation Styles (University of Toronto). 

At OISE, most of your course assignments will require you to follow the APA citation style. APA stands for American Psychological Association (APA), and the APA style is a type of citation standard normally employed by authors writing papers in social science fields, including education and psychology. 

In academic papers written in APA style there are two main citation components:

1. in-text citations
2. reference list

To learn about other types of reference list entries, refer to: 

• APA Style Reference List - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University (check the left-hand menu for reference list entries of different types of publications) 
• “References” on APA Style.