Citations and APA Format
When writing any kind of paper or essay, it is essential that you give credit to the sources that you use; you do this by appropriately citing these sources in parenthetical citations within your paper and in a reference list at the end of the paper. Failing to appropriately cite sources—either intentionally or unintentionally—is a serious academic violation called plagiarism. You should never represent someone else’s work or ideas as your own. Any time you have taken a statement, a fact, or even an idea from another author, you must cite it. A good rule to go by is that if you are in doubt about whether something must be cited, do it to be safe. Certain types of material always require citation, and others do not.
Material That Requires Citation
How to Cite: Citations should include the author, date, and page number of the source—(Author’s last name, year, p. #).
Direct Quote: Direct quotes always require a citation. • Shame is most simply a sense that one’s self is bad. According to Goldberg, it is a “conviction that in some important way one is flawed and incompetent as a human being” (1991, p. 191).
Paraphrase/Summary: A paraphrase takes a short section of text and restates the ideas in different words. A summary does the same but generally involves a larger portion of text. You might paraphrase the idea of a few sentences or a paragraph, and you might summarize the results of an entire study.
A paraphrase of the Goldberg quote above might be as follows:
• Shame is a feeling that one is somehow ruined or bad as a person (Goldberg, 1991, p. 191).
The following example briefly summarizes the main ideas of two separate texts. Each text is cited after the information that is drawn from that text. • Empirically, shame is linked with intrapersonal disorders such as narcissism (Nathanson, 1987) as well as numerous interpersonal