APA Guidelines – Names in Citations

Here’s a quick topic for tonight. I’m trying to get in the groove for posting as close to every day as possible but I just finished a paper comparing Java and C++ so this one is going to be short.

Basic format for an author’s name is simple. Like with most reference formats, the APA style uses a last-name-first (surname, family name, etc.) format. Only the first initial is used for first (given) name and any middle names. Titles (Jr., Sr., etc) come between the last name and the first initial and include an extra comma. That said, here are some examples:

• Heinlein, R. A.
• Fay, III, J. H.
• Prinze, Jr., F.

If you are citing a web page that is not based on a print source and the author is not explicitly stated then this is pretty easy; don’t put any names in the citation, just use the name of the page.

When names are available, you will need to use them in the citations. The APA style divides the citation types into two groups; references with one or two authors and references with three or more authors. When building the reference list, each of the authors should be listed for a resource; the differences come in when it comes time to include parenthetical citations in the text of the research paper. Here is a sample of a work with three names (stolen from yesterday’s post :)

Kraut, R., Olson, J., Banaji, M., Bruckman, A., Cohen, J., Couper, M.

How about that? Easy isn’t it? Now for reference/parenthetical citations. For works with a single author just put the author’s last name and the publication year separated by a comma. If your resource has two authors, use both their last names separated by an ampersand (&).

(Drapers, 2005)
(Herbert & Anderson, 2002)

With three or more authors things get a little trickier. The first time you cite one of these resources you will use all the last names separated with commas. Each subsequent citation, however, will only use the first author’s last name and “et al.” will be appended before the comma separating the name from the publication year (including italics). SO, to take from the example above, a reference to this resource would be look like…

(Kraut, Olson, Banaji, Bruckman, Cohen, & Couper, 2004)

…and following citations would look like…

(Kraut et al., 2004)

There you have it. One final note though. In references with authors along the lines of “Byrd & Associates” the word “associates” seems to count as one author. I do not have any specific documentation to back this up but that is what it looks like from the resources I have found.

Next Issue: I’ll probably get started on print resources and sometime soon I will try to locate some online resources to back up my articles and give you some more variety. Things have been a little sparse in this area but I will do my best.