As you format citations and reference lists, you need to follow certain rules and the practice used in scientific writing. This article outlines how citations are formatted in psychology (other scientific fields may differ).

The manner of formatting which is used in psychology is called the APA style. The abbreviation APA refers to the American Psychological Association, this association offers a “publication manual” which specifies the formatting style of papers to be published in the field of psychology. The next paragraphs teach you how to format citations of sources according to the APA Publication Manual in its Seventh Edition (APA 7th). Parts of this material were adopted from Prof. Dr. Greifeneder with permission. You may find examples and more information on the APA webpage.

Citations consist of two parts

The APA specifies how we as psychologists format the citations of sources in scientific papers. Citations appear in two places in a paper. First, in a paper’s main text we cite for example “Risky choice has been studied in evolutionary psychology (Houston & McNamara, 1988)”. This in-text citation in parenthesis is short and only mentions the author name(s) and the publication year of the source. Besides the in-text citation, at the end of the main text, we insert a much longer citation into a section titled “References”. The references section contains a longer reference to each source that was cited in-text. The longer reference includes author(s), year, title, journal title, journal issue number, and page numbers. The APA defines rules for formatting these citations in psychology. The APA rules exist because if the citations look similar in all psychological papers it makes it a lot easier for readers to find what they are looking for.

Citing sources: parentheses or embedded

When we write, we can either use parentheses or embed sources within the text itself. Using parentheses we can cite for example like so: “Risky choice has been studied in the field of evolutionary psychology (Houston & McNamara, 1988)”. Alternatively, embedded in the written text, we can write this as “Houston and McNamara (1988) have studied risky choice in the field of evolutionary psychology.” In papers written in German versus English papers there is a slight difference regarding the comma (see the PDF below).

Writing content: paraphrasing vs. direct quote

We can write about others’ ideas, theories, results, etc. either by directly quoting word by word (this is not common) or by describing others’ ideas in our own words (paraphrasing, this is very common). Paraphrasing is how we as scientists mostly write papers. A paraphrase should be followed by a citation in brackets “()”, like “Risky choice has been studied in the field of evolutionary psychology (Houston & McNamara, 1988)”. A direct quote needs quotation marks and must be followed by the quoted text’s page number, for instance: “… we thought that we would have no difficulty in finding an unambiguous answer” (Herzog & Hertwig, 2013, p. 191). Note: Direct quotes longer than 40 words are formatted indented and without quotation marks. Please keep in mind that in psychology we commonly avoid direct quotes in our scientific writing but mostly paraphrase and summarize other content.

Finding the correct format

Please click on the link that describes best what you want to cite. It will take you to the respective instruction. (At the end of this article, you will find a PDF version of this format guide in case you would like to download and print it.)

You are citing one source:

• with one or two authors
• with three and more authors

You are citing multiple sources:

• by different authors
• by the same authors
  a) in different years
  b) in the same year

The references section

In the references section, all references are listed that appear in the text (and only these). The list is sorted in ascending order by last name and year. The last names of authors and their initials are listed. In article titles, only the first word or words after a colon or period are capitalized. The lines of a reference are indented after the first line. As in text, double line spacing is required. For the three most important types of references, examples are listed in the following – for more information see the APA manual.

Articles

Author, A. A. (year). Article title. Journal Title, volume no.(issue no.), xxx-xxx. https://doi.org/10.xxxxx

• The article title is lowercase, except names and words after a full stop (.) or a colon (:). The journal title is italicized and the capitalization is maintained. After the volume (italicized), add theissue (in parentheses), the page numbers, the digital object identifier (doi). The doi is a unique hyperlink to find the paper online and dois can be found at https://www.crossref.org/guestquery/.
• Please note that the issue number can be omitted, if a journal has no issue numbers.

Example:
Higgins, E. T. (1998). The aboutness principle: A pervasive influence on human inference. Social Cognition, 16(1), 173-198. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.1998.16.1.173

Books

Author, A. A. (year). Book title. Publisher.
Author, A. A. (year). Book title [maybe e-reader version]. http://xxxxx

• The book title is italicized. List the publisher or, for online-only books, the webpage.

Example:
Malhotra, D., & Bazerman, M. (2008). Negotiation genius: How to overcome obstacles and achieve brilliant results at the bargaining table and beyond. Bantam Books.

Chapter in edited book

Author, A. A. (year). Chapter title. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Book title (pp. xx-xx). Publisher.

• List editors (initials before the last name). List page numbers.
• German: Ed. / Eds. = Hrsg. / pp. = S.

Examples:
Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N., Fazendeiro, T. A., & Reber, R. (2003). The hedonic marking of processing fluency: Implications for evaluative judgment. In J. Musch & K. C. Klauer (Eds.), The psychology of evaluation: Affective processes in cognition and emotion (pp. 189-217). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Format guide for citations in the text

One source, one or two authors

Written in parentheses

1. (name, year)
2. (name1 & name2, year)

Example:
1. …found the effect (Higgins, 1998).
2. …found the effect (Reber & Schwarz, 1999).

Embedded

1. name (year)
2. name1 and name2 (year)

Examples:
1. Higgins (1998) pointed out…
2. Reber and Schwarz (1999) conducted a study…

One source, three and more authors

Written in parentheses

(name1 et al., year)

Example:
(Meyer et al., 2015)

Embedded

name1 et al. (year)

Example:
Meyer et al. (2015) wanted to know…

• Write the first author’s name and use “et al.” to replace the remaining authors; “et al.” means “and others” in Latin.
• Note that there is one exception to using “et al.”: if there are two sources like “Smith, Wang, & Miller, 2018” and “Smith, Brown, & Thompson, 2018”, that both share the first author and year, then both of those would both be abbreviated to “Smith et al., 2018”. The citation “Smith et al., 2018” could refer to “Smith, Wang, & Miller, 2018” or to “Smith, Brown, & Thompson, 2018” and it is unclear which source it refers to. In this case, we spell out all authors’ names until the first discriminating name. Please, see https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/same-year-first-author

Multiple sources by different authors

Written in parentheses: alphabetical order, separated by semicolons

• In which cases you need to give more than one reference is explained in the previous chapter.

Example:
(Higgins, 1998; Reber & Schwarz, 1999)

Multiple sources by the same authors in different years

Written in parentheses: chronological order, separation by commas, ‘in press’ last

Example:
(Reber & Schwarz, 1999, 2001)

Embedded: Chronological order, separated by commas, ‘in press’ last

Example:
Reber and Schwarz (1999, 2001) investigated…

Multiple sources by the same authors in the same year

Written in parentheses

(names, year a, year b)

Example:
(Leary, 2005a, 2005b)

Embedded

names (year a, year b)

Example:
Leary (2005a, 2005b) found…

References (in English APA style)

Higgins, E. T. (1998). The aboutness principle: A pervasive influence on human inference. Social Cognition, 16, 173-198. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.1998.16.1.173

Leary, M. R. (2005a). Interpersonal cognition and the quest for social acceptance: Inside the sociometer. In M. W. Baldwin (Ed.), Interpersonal cognition (pp. 85-102). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Leary, M. R. (2005b). Sociometer theory and the pursuit of relational value: Getting to the root of self-esteem. European Review of Social Psychology, 16, 75-111. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463280540000007

Malhotra, D., & Bazerman, M. (2008). Negotiation genius: How to overcome obstacles and achieve brilliant results at the bargaining table and beyond. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Meyer, A., Frederick, S., Burnham, T., Guevara Pinto, J., Boyer, T., Ball, L., . . . Schuldt, J. (2015). Disfluent fonts don’t help people solve math problems. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, e16-e30. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000049

Müller, P., Greifeneder, R., Stahlberg, D., Van den Bos, K., & Bless, H. (2010). Shaping cooperation behavior: The role of accessibility experiences. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 178-187. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.632

Reber, R., & Schwarz, N. (1999). Effects of perceptual fluency on judgments of truth. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, 8, 338-342. https://doi.org/10.1006/ccog.1999.0386

Reber, R., & Schwarz, N. (2001). The hot fringes of consciousness: Perceptual fluency and affect. Consciousness and Emotion, 2, 223-231. https://doi.org/10.1075/ce.2.2.03reb

Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N., Fazendeiro, T. A., & Reber, R. (2003). The hedonic marking of processing fluency: Implications for evaluative judgment. In J. Musch & K. C. Klauer (Eds.), The psychology of evaluation: Affective processes in cognition and emotion (pp. 189-217). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

VandenBos, G. R. (Ed.). (2010). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Herzog, S. M., & Hertwig, R. (2013). The ecological validity of fluency. In C. Unkelbach & R. Greifeneder (Eds.), The experience of thinking: How the fluency of mental processes influences cognition and behavior (pp. 190-219). Hove, United Kingdom: Psychology Press.

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