 In this Knowledge Clip, we will explain some basic guidelines on how to cite the documents that you use to support what you write in your paper. The information in this Knowledge Clip is based on the 7th edition of the APA Guidelines as presented by APA, the American Psychological Association. APA presents guidelines for the citing of all kinds of documents you may want to use – think about journal articles, websites, policy papers, etc. In this Knowledge Clip, we will focus on the two most cited types of documents – journal articles and books. If you want to cite other documents, please refer to the official APA manual. The APA guidelines include rules on in-text citing and on how to present your sources in a reference list. Let's first look at the rules for in-text citing. In-text citations are brief references in your text that direct readers to the reference entry at the end of your paper. You include them every time you quote or paraphrase someone else's ideas or words. An APA in-text citation consists of the author's last name and the year of publication. There are two forms of in-text citation – parenthetical and narrative. This is an example of the parenthetical citation. The author name or names and year of publication is at the end of the sentence between brackets. The narrative citation works slightly differently. Here you see an example. The names of the authors are now in the text and the year of publication is included directly after the author name, again between brackets. Please also note that in case of two authors, the parenthetical citation uses the ampersand symbol and the narrative citation uses the word and. If a source has three or more authors, you only mention the first author and add et al. If you want to use more sources to support your text, you can put them all between the same brackets, separated by a semicolon. Please make sure the sources between the brackets are in alphabetical order. If you copy a piece of text word for word, for example if you want to quote a definition for one of your variables, you put the text between double quotation marks and add a page number to the in-text citing. Let's now look at the references. Your references are listed at the end of your paper. All in-text sightings should reappear in your reference list. Please note that the reference list is in alphabetical order. Let's start with some formatting guidelines for your reference section. First, make sure your reference list starts on a new page. Second, put references in bold as the title at the top of this page and center this heading. Third, make sure the line spacing is the same as for the rest of the paper. This means double spacing and no white lines between references. Fourth, indent from the second line of every reference. Here you see an example of the start of a reference list. Please note that the indentation of the references is the other way round compared to how you indent for a paragraph. In the example, the first reference is for a journal article and the second one is for a book. As you can see, they are slightly different regarding the information they provide as well as on the use of italics. Let's take a closer look at these references. The reference starts with the last name of the author or authors. The author may be a single person, a group of people, a corporation or any combination of these. Start with the last name of the first author, followed by a comma and the initials, separated by a period and space. Separate the names of multiple authors with commas. Before the last author's name, you should also insert an ampersand. Please note that infixes such as van or dur should be treated as part of the last name. After the author or authors comes the date. In the case of journal papers, use the year the volume was published. When it comes to books, use the copyright date. The date is between brackets. After the second bracket is a period. Next, present the name of the work you're citing. Put a period after the title. For a journal article, you now add the name of the journal in italics, followed by a comma, the volume of the journal in italic and the addition between brackets and another comma. Now present the page numbers and end with a period. Finally, you present the DOI number of the reference. Please note that the addition and page numbers are not in italic. The way you cite a book is slightly different. Now the title is in italics and after the title comes the publisher. The sixth edition of APA previously required you to include the city and state where the publisher was located, but this is no longer the case. Books do not always have a DOI, but if they have one, you include the DOI in the reference after the publisher name. When referring to the titles of books, chapters, articles, reports, webpages or other sources, capitalise only the first letter of the first word of the title and subtitle, the first word after a colon or a dash in the title and proper nouns. However, capitalise all major words in the titles of journals. You are now at the end of this knowledge clip. Please be aware that there is also a knowledge clip on how to format your document according to APA guidelines.