In-Text Citations are the citations within the body of your paper that let your reader know where the research came from. This will only include a few things, like the author(s) last name, year of publication, and page numbers (when available).
There are two main ways to write an in-text citation: incorporated in the sentence (narrative in-text citation) and at the end of the sentence (parenthetical in-text citation). Narrative in-text citations should include the author's last name (see below for cases with more than one author) and generally will not include information like the title of the article or the journal.
For example:
According to Smith (2014) "citations should be used whenever referencing outside sources so that it's clear to the reader where the research has come from" (p. 24).
It's important for the author to always cite their research any time information in their writing is coming from an outside source so that the reader knows where it's coming from (Smith, 2014).
Note: You only need to include the page number when directly quoting the source. The first example, above, is a direct quote; the second example is a paraphrase.
In the below examples "X" is used as a "fill in the blank here" placeholder for where the information would go if this were a real source.
Two authors:
When citations are done correctly, it is easy for the reader to skim over the citation information such as the year or page number if they do not need it, but they can still find the information easily in the reference list (Jones & Miller, 2019).
Three or more authors:
When citations are done correctly, it is easy for the reader to skim over the citation information such as the year or page number if they do not need it, but they can still find the information easily in the reference list (Jones et al., 2020).
An organization:
The National Institute of Health (2018) conducted a study on stress in college students and found X.
A study conducted on issues around stress and school found that X (National Institute of Health [NIH], 2018).
For this last example, you would only include the whole name for this first use, then you would use the organization's acronym for future citations, like (NIH, 2018) because you’ve established that NIH stands for National Institute of Health. This can be done with any organization that uses an acronym, like FBI, NIH, NPS (National Park Service), CIA, etc.
You often don’t need to introduce the authors in the sentence when you are paraphrasing, but it’s okay to do so if you want. It can be more useful when it’s a well-known organization, in particular.
You may on occasion run into a situation where you want to quote something from an article that was originally from another article (this is called citing Secondary Sources). For this example, let's pretend that you found the Smith quote from above in another article. In that case you would do the following:
According to Smith (2014) "citations should be used whenever referencing outside sources so that it's clear to the reader where the research has come from" (as cited in Jones, 2019, p. 76).
In the above example, the article you were reading was the one written by Jones, but he cited an article by Smith.