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Human Development & Family Studies: APA (American Psychological Association)

A LibGuide to support HDFS faculty and students

APA Citation Rules

Rules for creating the in-text citations for an APA paper can be found at APA in text citation rules which is at the Purdue-OWL web site.

Rules for creating your reference list in the APA format are found at Rules for an APA reference page which is also at the Purdue-OWL web site.

If you do not want to create your own citations for the reference page, find a good up-to-date citation generator to use.  Make sure the citation generator is using the most current rules, and put all of your citations through it.  Most of the databases you use will provide citations in a variety of formats.  However, the rules may change every few years and there is no guarantee that when the rules change, the database owners will go back and update all older citations.  So, make sure that all of your citations are in the most recent format by checking them with an up-to-date generator.

Books and eBooks That Will Assist With APA Citation Format

Additional APA Resources