Reference Machine - In-text Citations

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On this page: How to do an in-text citation, and links to how to do a bibliography/list of references.
Related pages: an exercise on in-text citations, and a list of other pages on referencing.


In-text citation (a reference to put in your essay next to a quotation, paraphrase or summary).
Using the APA and Harvard styles used by the English Language Centre.

Fill in the boxes, and then press the 'Make Citation' button:

1. Author or editor's  family name(s): (Help)
.
e.g. Wong
e.g. Fu & Wong
e.g. Au et al. (for works with 3 or more authors)
.
2. Year of publication:
.
e.g.
3. Page number(s):
(If you are referring to the whole book, you don't have to put in page numbers.
e.g. 12
e.g. 21-23
e.g. 21, 25
  If you are using APA style and citing an internet page with no page numbers, you can write the section title; e.g. Conclusion, and the paragraph number in that section. If there are no section names, just use the paragraph number, counting from the top of the page. e.g.
  Section title: e.g. Introduction
  Paragraph number: e.g. 3
4.  Click here: .

Choose a way to put the reference in the text:
(It's boring for the reader if you use the same way every time).

1. At the end of the quotation, summary or paraphrase:

 

2. At the start of the quotation, summary or paraphrase:


 

3. In the middle of the quotation, summary or paraphrase:

 

Now you have done an in-text reference, you need a bibliography reference at the end of your writing (unless you have already done a bibliography reference for this source.)

 

Bibliography references

2. Do you want to do a reference for:

  • a book (where all the content is written by only one author, or up to three authors working together. The chapters should not be by different authors).
  • an article in a journal. A journal has many articles, written by different authors.  A journal is a periodical, which means that a new issue is produced monthly, quarterly or yearly etc., so it has different issues, as shown in a Volume number and a Number.
  • an edited volume (a book which has articles or chapters written by different authors, and editors who write the introduction. There is only one issue, which is why it is different from a journal.)
  • a newspaper or magazine article
  • an Internet reference?

 


Related Pages:

Referencing Resources on the Internet


 

Author's Family Name Help:

If you can't find an author's name, for example in a newspaper or magazine, use the title of the newspaper or magazine.

If there are more than two authors, use the first author or editor's family name, then use 'et al.' (meaning 'and others').
For example,  Chan et al. (1999: p. 25) also say that "...".

If you don't know which name is the family name and which are the other names:

  1. Look at the pages in the front of the book for the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. If you see the author's name with a comma after the first word, then that first word is the author's family name.
  2. Use the library catalogue to search for the title of the book, then look for the author's name.
  3. Search for the book at Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble, find the book by its title, then look for the author's family name.
  4. Check the list of other names.
  5. If you can't find the information in the sources above, use all of the name.

Back to the form

 

Last updated on: Monday, February 14, 2022