Introduction to In-Text Citations
What are in-text citations?
When you write something that should be supported by sources, it’s very important to help the reader understand where you are getting your information from. If you just put references at the end of the paper with no in-text citations, then the reader would have to search through every source to investigate or learn more about the information you introduced.
In-text citations create a link between your fact and the end references. To help connect the reader to the end reference, we include two key points:
(Author, Year)
About the author
Here are some basic rules about citing authors:
|
Single author |
(Surname, year) |
(Bentley, 2017) (McKinnon, 2018) |
|
Two authors |
(Surname & Surname, year) |
(Sanders & Richmond, 2020) (Barrows & Wright, 2019) |
|
Three or more authors |
(Surname et al., year) |
(Chan et al., 2019) (Smith et al., 2011) |
|
Organization as author |
(Organization, year) |
(CBC, 2021) (Government of Canada, 2021) |
Usage notes
- Always pair a citation with each fact. See the resource about integrating sources.
- Put the citation BEFORE the period.
- Pay careful attention to spacing – we use spaces after each punctuation mark EXCEPT for the period in “et al.”. With “et al”, we put the comma immediately after.
- Although you will include the full date (YYYY, Month DD) or (YYYY, Season) in the end reference, you will only write the year in the in-text citation.