The Center for Writing and Communication, housed on the first floor of McWherter Library, offers free, individual consultations with trained staff. Get feedback on your writing and speaking assignments at any stage in the process.
APA Style uses an author-date citation system for in-text citations, which just means you cite the author and the publication date in your in-text citations. You usually only need to include the author's surname and the publication year.
APA Style includes the citation information in parentheses (parenthetical citations) after the information you want to cite. The basic format is to put the author's surname, a comma, and then the publication year.
Let's look at an example. We want to cite this scholarly journal article in the text. The author is "Farrah Bara," so we would include the surname "Bara." The publication date is the year 2019. So a parenthetical citation would look like:
The 1978 consent degree between the City of Memphis and its citizens is a useful example of how protect First Amendment rights (Bara, 2019).
There is also an alternative way to format an in-text citation in APA, called a narrative citation, where the author is written into your sentence so they are part of your "narrative." The publication date follows the author in parentheses. Here an example for a narrative citation for the same source from above:
Bara (2019) found that the 1978 consent degree between the City of Memphis and its citizens is a useful example of how protect First Amendment rights.
APA calls the complete list of works cited at the end of a paper with all the information needed to get access to them the "Reference List." Each citation entry in the Reference List is made of four basic elements: author, date, title, and source. Each element tells you something important about the cited source.
Let's look at the Reference List entry for the scholarly article we used as an example for in-text citations to see the four elements:
Bara, F. (2019). From Memphis, with love: A model to protect protesters in the age of surveillance. Duke Law Journal, 69(1), 197–229. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol69/iss1/3
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association by 
