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.

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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, Fu &Yip e.g. Au, Fu & Yip et al. (Use "et al." when there are more than 3 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?

 

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Related Pages:

Referencing Resources on the Internet

• Referencing Pages - an overview of using sources and referencing
• Reference Machine - a program to help you write references. You fill in the boxes with the author's name etc. and the computer formats the reference for you. You can use one of the following styles:
  
  • APA style: for an in-text citation, a book, an article in a journal, a chapter in an edited volume, a newspaper or magazine article, an Internet reference, an online image music or an AI chatbot.
  • Harvard style: for  an in-text citation, a book, an article in a journal, a chapter in an edited volume, a newspaper or magazine article, or an Internet reference.
  • Vancouver style: for a book, an article in a journal, a chapter in an edited volume, a newspaper or magazine article, an Internet reference, or an AI chatbot (e.g. ChatGPT).
  • IEEE style: for a book, a part or chapter in a book, an article in a journal, an article in an e-journal
• Referencing Exercises: Spot the errors and correct them in in-text references and in bibliographical references.
• Choosing whether to use a quotation, summary or paraphrase.
• Secondary citation
• Example academic essay with the quotations, summaries and paraphrases highlighted. It also contains in-text citations and references. The topic is how to design navigation for Internet pages.
• List of referencing-related books in CILL.

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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, write all the names the first time you refer to that book. For the second and later times you refer to the same book, use the first author or editor's family name, then use 'et al.' (meaning 'and others').
For example,  (First reference) Chan, Fu & Wong (1999: p. 21) write that "...".
                      (Second and later references) 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

 

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Last updated: Tuesday, 19 October 2021

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hits since 29 November 1999.