APA Referencing
2007

Note: this page is only an introduction to the APA (American Psychological Association) referencing system.
For a comprehensive guide please refer to:
American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological
Association (5th ed.). Washington DC: APA.
It is very important that you check the assignment guide for your Department or School as some details,
e.g. punctuation, may vary from the guidelines on this page. You may be penalised for not conforming to your school's requirements.

What is Referencing?
Referencing is a standardised method of acknowledging sources of information and ideas that you have used in your assignment in a way that uniquely identifies their source. Direct quotations, facts and figures, as well as ideas and theories, from both published and unpublished works, must be referenced.
There are many acceptable forms of referencing. This information sheet provides a brief guide to the APA referencing style for in-text citations and for creating the Reference List (examples are below). Within the text of the assignment the author’s name is given first, followed by the publication date. Include page numbers for direct quotations and also where it is useful to provide a page number. A reference list at the end of the assignment contains the full details of all the in-text citations.

Why Reference?
Referencing is necessary to avoid plagiarism, to verify quotations, and to enable readers to follow-up and read more fully the cited author’s arguments.

Steps Involved in Referencing
1. Note down the full bibliographic details of the source from which the information is taken. Include the relevant page number(s).
In the case of a book, ‘bibliographical details’ refers to: author/editor, year of publication, title, edition, volume number, place of publication and publisher