The following is a rough guide to the APA (American Psychological Association) referencing format. This is the most popular format in the Social Sciences. However, you should always check with the lecturer/instructor setting the paper, since there are other formats (e.g. MLA, Chicago) used in academic writing.
Note that this page only lists formats for the most common types of publication. For a complete and more detailed reference, and information on MLA format, go to the Univerity of Illinois' Bibliography Styles Handbook
The basic format is:
Surname, Initials. (year). Full Title. Place of publication: Publisher.
For example:
Jones, D. (1961) Population Change in Papua New Guinea. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Rotweiler, P, J. & Dobermann. (1980) The British Working Classes: an Ethnological Approach. London: Penguin.
Give the author's name and year of publication as normal, then the title. Do not use italics or capitals. To say what book it is in, give the editors' names as they appear on the title page (usually first name or initials, surname), followed by (ed.) or (eds.), then the title and publication details as for a normal book.
Obscurant, G. (1990) Phrase structure in Nepalese counterfactuals: a preliminary survey. In David J. Plough (ed.) Developments in Post-Generative Linguistics. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.
These are similar, except that you need the full date for newspapers and magazines. You do not need to give the publisher or place of publication. The format is
Author, Initials (year, month, day) Title. Name of newspaper/magazine. Page(s).
Worsetorn, P. (1989 May 1) Labour's lunatic fringe. The Daily Telegraph. p. 15.
With some newspaper articles there is no author named. In this case, just leave it out and start with the title.
Elvis Found on Mars! (1995, April 1) The Sunday Sport. p. 3.
Academic journals are not usually dated but have a volume and/or issue number (if both are given, separate them with a coloiven, separate them with a colon, e.g. "Volume IV, Number 9" is "3:9").
Kugelschreiber, G. (1980) Are racist views inherited? Sociobiology Review, 4:10 p. 45-60.
For Web pages, use the following format:
Surname, Initials (year, month, day) Document title. Name of Website. <URL> (date that you accessed the page)
Hacker, L. (1995, January 23) How to break into Windows NT. Hacker's World <http://www.hack.com/NT.html> (2000 February 12)
Usually you will not be able to find all of this information, so just put in what you have, e.g.
Why I hate Bill Gates. <http://www.linuxfan.net/Gates.html> (2000 February 13)
For e-mail messages to discussion lists, newsgroups etc, use the following format:
Surname, Initials <author's e-mail address> (year month day) subject line. <address of list etc.> (date that you accessed the mail)
Smith, J. <smith@cuckoo.com.uk> (2000 February 15) Re:Gnomes of Zurich <alt.fan.conspiracy> (2000, March 1)
Short quotations should be included in the body of your text, and can sometimes be part of another sentence e.g.
It is an increasingly common idea on the Right that "there is no such thing as society" (Thatcher, 1980).
As Taylor (1982, p. 167) points out "Communities are necessarily small, and 'universal community' impossible."
The minimum information you need is the author's surname and the year of publication or broadcast. If you are quoting from or referring to a particular page, you should also give the page number after the year (it is not given in the first example, since the quotation is from a speech, not a book). If the reference is to more than one page, use "pp.", e.g. "(Johnson, pp. 25-28)".
Long quotations should be separated from the rest of your text in a paragraph of their own which is indented i.e. written about 2 cm in from each margin. It may also be written in a smaller font. If you do not want to use all of a quotation, you can use three dots ... to indicate that there is material missing. You can also insert comments of your own in square brackets [like this]. For example:
They [the American revolutionaries] thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum of government upon the same sociological ground that the modern Anarchist derives the no-government theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal. The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the majority in those matters involving united action of any kind and, on the other hand, the belief that majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government, no matter any government, no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority.
DeClaire (1932, p. 1)
Even if you paraphrase or summarise an author's ideas you need to give a reference, since if you do not, it may still be counted as plagiarism. On the positive side, citation proves that you have actually read the author, thus making your essay more impressive. Again, you should have the author's surname and the year of publication. If you are commenting on the book as a whole you obviously don't need a page number; otherwise include it as you would do with a quotation. For example,
Right-wing libertarians such as Nozick (1992) also invoke "state-of-nature" theory. This view has been criticised on the grounds that voluntary transactions do not necessarily lead to voluntary results (Taylor, 1982:96).
This page is adapted from:
Turner, R. (2004) From Brainstorm to Bibliography: Writing a
term paper in the social sciences and humanities.
Ankara: Bilkent University
The full version is available as a PDF file: click here to download it.