APA (American Psychological Association) Referencing Guidelines: General Principles/Rules

Any piece of academic writing that you do at university or report writing during later employment will require a reference list.  Referencing gives your writing very important elements such as:

• Transparency – ideas that you have included in your essay are clearly acknowledged.
• Reliability – material is provided from sources that have been written by experts.
• Traceability – people who want to check out facts that you have written can do so by easily finding your sources of information. 
• Credibility – material is taken from trustworthy sources and has not been made up by you or gleaned from unreliable sources.

This may include references to data, opinions, images and a range of other information. Where research data is included then confidentiality must be maintained e.g. by anonymising responses to surveys, removing details of a patient or client.

The need to avoid plagiarism and learning to reference properly are two key parts of the same process which you need to understand. Plagiarism is considered to be any attempt to use another person’s words, data, images or ideas and present them as your own.  It is cheating. The University treats plagiarism as a very serious issue; click here for further information.  From the outset of your academic career you need to develop good academic practices to avoid plagiarism.

• By reading your sources of information and writing everything in your own words. 
• By properly referencing the sources of the information that you have used to write your essay, report or any other piece of assessment. 
• You can use information word for word but if you do this you must enclose the words in quotation marks and also reference the exact page from where you took the information.
• Do not copy the content of your own or another person’s previously submitted assignments.

These guidelines have been designed to help you correctly reference the work you use during your course, will help to ensure accuracy and consistency.   

There are a number of systems for the citation of references.  Always check with your lecturer/supervisor which referencing style you are expected to use.  This guide covers the the American Psychological Association (7th edition, 2020) referencing style.  

In using the APA referencing system you need to do two things:

• In the text you must include an in-text citation.
• At the end of your work you must include a complete list of references, in alphabetical order by author’s surname.   

There must be a direct match between your in-text citation and the reference list at the end of your work.