APA In-Text Citations: Authors, et al., Page Numbers, and Hard Cases

APA is an author-date style. Every in-text citation gives the author's surname and the year of publication, and every in-text citation must match an entry in the reference list. The reference list supplies the full record; the in-text citation only points at it.

There are two shapes, and they are interchangeable in meaning. A parenthetical citation puts both elements in brackets at the end of the statement: (Shannon, 1948). A narrative citation puts the author in the sentence and the year straight after the name: Shannon (1948) showed that... Use the narrative form when the author matters to your argument, and the parenthetical form when the finding matters more than who produced it.

• Parenthetical: the ampersand joins two authors inside brackets, as in (Smith & Jones, 2020).
• Narrative: the word and joins them in running text, as in Smith and Jones (2020) argued...
• The year goes immediately after the author in a narrative citation, not at the end of the sentence.
• Every in-text citation needs a matching reference-list entry, and every reference-list entry needs at least one in-text citation.

The number of authors decides the form, and APA 7 changed the rule that most remembered guidance still gets wrong. In APA 7, a work with three or more authors is cited as the first author followed by et al. from the very first citation. There is no longer a first-citation-lists-everyone step, which is what APA 6 required for works with three to five authors.

Two authors are always both named, every time. There is no point at which a two-author work becomes et al.

1. One author: (Shannon, 1948), or Shannon (1948) in narrative form.
2. Two authors: name both at every mention. (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), or Tversky and Kahneman (1974).
3. Three or more authors: first author plus et al. from the first citation onward. (Jumper et al., 2021).
4. Group author with a familiar abbreviation: give both at first use, as in (World Health Organization [WHO], 2020), then (WHO, 2020) afterwards.
5. Group author with no abbreviation: write the full name every time.

A direct quotation always needs a location as well as an author and year, so the reader can find the exact words. A paraphrase does not require one, but APA encourages adding it when it would help a reader locate the passage in a long work, and many supervisors require it.

Use p. for a single page and pp. for a range. When the source has no page numbers, cite whatever stable division it does have.

• Single page: (Shannon, 1948, p. 379).
• Page range: (Shannon, 1948, pp. 379-380).
• No pagination, numbered paragraphs: (Smith, 2020, para. 4).
• No pagination, headed sections: cite the heading and the paragraph within it, as in (Smith, 2020, Methods section, para. 2).
• Quotations of 40 words or more are set as a block quotation without quotation marks, and the citation follows the final punctuation.

Most APA questions are not about ordinary articles. They are about a document that does not fit the template, and the answer is almost always the same: cite what the work is, not the container it arrived in.

• A PDF is not a source type. Cite the report, article, or book that the PDF contains, using that work's own author, date, and publisher. The file format never appears in the citation.
• No date: use n.d. in place of the year, in both the in-text citation and the reference, as in (Smith, n.d.). Do not substitute a copyright year, a retrieval date, or the year you found it.
• An abstract you read without the full text is cited as the abstract, because it is what you actually consulted. If you read the full work, cite the work.
• Secondary source, where you read a quotation of something you could not obtain: (Shannon, 1948, as cited in Jones, 2022). Only Jones appears in your reference list. Find the original wherever you can, because as cited in tells a reader you did not verify it.
• Two works by the same author in the same year: add letters, as in (Smith, 2020a) and (Smith, 2020b), assigned by the order the references appear alphabetically by title.
• Different authors with the same surname: add initials, as in (J. Smith, 2020) and (R. Smith, 2019).