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The purpose of references is to enable the reader to access the material used in your research for the paper. Citation of a work implies that you have personally read the cited work. (See instructions about secondary sources for works that you read about in another work.)

[Major changes from the 6th edition are highlighted in yellow.]

All sources (except personal communications) from which material is used for an article must be cited in two places in the article: (i) detailed information about the source appears in the Reference List at the end of the paper; and (ii) a brief In-text Citation, consisting of the author’s name and date of publication, appears within the body of the paper at each place the source is used. This document includes a discussion of both.

Informing Science Institute journals follow the American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines for formatting references and citations, as well as the guidelines for punctuation and grammar. The Informing Science Institute uses its own layout for articles. These ISI format guidelines can be found at: http://www.informingscience.org/Uploads/JournalFormat.docx 

These notes are a summary of our best understanding of the APA guidelines for references and citations and are not intended as a substitute for the guidelines published by APA. This website now has detailed information and numerous examples. For examples not found in this summary, go to https://apastyle.apa.org/ and click on STYLE AND GRAMMAR GUIDELINES at the top of the page for guidelines sorted by type.

Additional information can be found at the following.

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). APA style blog. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog 

American Psychological Association. (2020a). Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS). https://apastyle.apa.org/jars 
(Discusses aspects of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research)

American Psychological Association. (2020c). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

American Psychological Association. (2020e). What’s new in the seventh edition publication manual. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/whats-new-7e 

Purdue University Online Writing Lab. (n.d.) APA formatting and style. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ 

[Free online rules for English grammar can be found at
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/ and http://www.grammarbook.com/ ]