Your paper will consist of a mix of your ideas and ideas of others. You put the ideas of other people in your essay in one of two ways. By quoting, which means that you copy words from somebody else. Or by paraphrasing, which means you write their ideas in your own words.
Citing Research
A quote and a paraphrase require you to write (or cite) the author you took the information from. Citing research is no more than naming the author of the research you quoted or paraphrased. We have two ways to do this. We can either put the author's name and the year of publication in brackets after the sentence.
Kangaroos can jump to a remarkable height of 3 meters (Turner, 2020).
Or we can put the author's name first. We do this by introducing the author's name in the text and then writing the date in brackets before the sentence.
According to Turner (2020), kangaroos can jump to a remarkable height of 3 meters.
Use both of these in-text citation styles for a professional looking paper.
Et Al.
If your source was written by three or more authors only write the first author's name followed by the words ‘et al.’. ‘Et al.’ means ‘and others’ in Latin.
Frustrations occur because instructors do not have the skills to predict and troubleshoot technical issues before they arise (Groff et al., 2008).
As Cited In
Sometimes you may need to cite a source within a source. For example, you are reading a book by Pinker and he cites information from the author Torres. In your paper, you cite the original author (Torres) followed by ‘as cited in’ and then the author and year of the source you are reading.
Bi-lingual speakers commonly change language without realizing they are doing so (Torres, 2007, as cited in Pinker, 2018).
In your reference list only include the details of the book you read.
Reference List
Finally, your reference list goes on a new page at the end of your paper. Here you write the full details of all of the sources you used in your paper. References are written slightly differently depending on if they are published in a journal, book, webpage, newspaper, or other source. Grab the pink APA 7 Citation handout at the library entrance to help with your reference list.
APA 7 has strict rules for how your paper should look. This includes the look of your title page, the font you use, heading styles, and the spacing and indenting of each paragraph.
See here for a sample APA 7 formatted paper (APA.org).