An in-text citation is a short entry within your text to point the reader towards the full entry in your reference list.
When inserting a citation for APA in-text, include the author's surname and year of publication, enclosed in brackets ( ).
For example: (Smith, 2019)
In-text citations appear in the body of the work (or table, figure etc.). They enable readers to locate the corresponding entry in the reference list.
In-text citations are usually presented in the following two ways:
The author and date appear within parentheses:
Example: The issue was described in more detail (Smith, 2020).
The author appears in the text with the date in parentheses:
Example: Smith (2020) describes the issue in more detail...
If you include a direct quote, that is word-for-word, from another source the in-text citation must include the author, year and page number where the quotation appeared.
When paraphrasing a source (putting it into your own words), it is not required to include page numbers in the in-text citation, however it may still be useful to do so to help the reader locate the paraphrased information in a large source such as a textbook.
Climate change is currently a heated debate, so it is important to understand what constitutes ‘climate change’. Attributed to “burning fossil fuels, agriculture, and land clearing” (Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, n.d., para. 2), the effects of climate change are often measured in different ways. Lewandowsky and Whitmarsh (2018) suggest that rising sea levels are one of the most reliable measures for recording changes to the climate on a global scale – with weather patterns often incorrectly used to endorse or refute climate change. The focus of measurement should be of distinct climates, such as glaciers, rather than seasonal changes as is often the case (Lewandowsky & Whitmarsh, 2018). So, to understand climate change it is important to separate what is actual climate change from the results of changing weather patterns.
