How to Do Inline Citations

It’s important to give credit where it’s due, especially in an academic setting. Whether you’re writing an essay or doing a thesis, you must properly cite your sources, not only to tell your readers where you found the information, but to show them you’ve done the research. This, in turn, increases the credibility of your work and prevents instances of plagiarism.

Inline citations—also called in-text citations—are used to show the sources that you’ve quoted or paraphrased within a body of text of an academic paper. They act as signposts for the sources mentioned in the reference list, bibliography, or works cited at the end of your paper. This allows your readers the opportunity to check the resources that were used in the paper because there must be a corresponding entry for every inline (in-text) citation.

How you format your in-text citations will depend on the style you use, for example APA or MLA. Always check with your school’s instructions to see which one is appropriate as the guidelines for each style varies. However, while the sequence may be different, the information that should be present is the same. That is, the author’s last name, the year published, and sometimes the page number of the source. Additionally, in-text citations can take one of two forms; parenthetical or narrative.

• Parenthetical citation: The study was done incorrectly (Ferguson, 2020)
• Narrative citation: Ferguson (2020) posits that the study was done incorrectly.

How to Do In-Text Citations in APA Style

In-text citations using APA style contain the author’s last name and the publication year, for example (Clarke, 2021). If you’re using a direct quote, or a fact or figure from a specific page, you should also provide the page number that information is found on, for example (Clarke, 2021, p.29). For sources such as websites and eBooks that have no page numbers, use a paragraph number, for example (Clarke, 2021, para. 4).

Here are a few examples of in-text citation done using APA style.

Narrative:

• Becker (2013) defined gamification as giving the mechanics of principles of a game to other activities.
• Cho and Castañeda (2019) noted that game-like activities are frequently used in language classes that adopt mobile and computer technologies.

Parenthetical:

• Gamification involves giving the mechanics or principles of a game to another activity (Becker, 2013).
• Increasingly, game-like activities are frequently used in language classes that adopt mobile and computer technologies (Cho & Castañeda, 2019).

How to Do In-Text Citations in MLA/Chicago Style

Chicago style in-text citations can follow the (author, date, page number) in-text citation system, like APA style. It can also follow the notes and bibliography format where you put your citations in numbered footnotes or endnotes. Whichever format you choose should be used consistently throughout your paper.

• Author date style: There are only two known cases of Riverton syndrome (Smith 2018, 316–317).
• Footnote: Martin argues that “parasitic conditions can be misdiagnosed as gastrointestinal illnesses.”¹

When using the footnote format, your superscript numbers should following sequentially (1, 2, 3, etc.)

MLA style in-text citation follows the author-page method of in-text citation which includes the author’s last name and the page where the quote or paraphrase is taken from. The author’s name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the cited source, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence.

• Wordsworth stated that Romantic poetry was marked by a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (263).
• Romantic poetry is characterized by the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 263).