Citing Your Sources - ASA Style: In-Text Citations

Citations in the text include the last name of the author(s) and year of publication.

Include page numbers when quoting directly from a work or referring to specific passages.

Identify subsequent citations of the same source in the same way as the first.

Examples follow:

• If the author’s name is in the text, follow it with the publication year in parentheses:

…in another study by Duncan (1959).

• If the author’s name is not in the text, enclose the last name and publication year in parentheses:

…whenever it occurred (Gouldner 1963).

• Pagination follows the year of publication after a colon, with no space between the colon and the page number:

…Kuhn (1970:71).

Note: This is the preferred ASA style. Older forms of text citations are not acceptable:  

(Kuhn 1970, p. 71).

• Give both last names for joint authors:

…(Martin and Bailey 1988).

• If a work has three authors, cite all three last names in the first citation in the text; thereafter, use et al. in the citation. If a work has more than three authors, use et al. in the first citation and in all subsequent citations.

• First citation for a work with three authors:

…had been lost (Carr, Smith, and Jones 1962)

Later citations in the same document

…(Carr et al. 1962)

• If a work cited was reprinted from a version published earlier, list the earliest publication date in brackets, followed by the publication date of the recent version used.

…Veblen ([1899] 1979) stated that…

• Separate a series of references with semicolons. List the series in alphabetical or date order, but be consistent throughout the manuscript.

…(Green1995; Mundi 1987; Smith and Wallop 1989).

- This information reprinted from the ASA Quick Style Guide PDF document, accessed on July 26, 2011. http://www.asanet.org/Quick Style Guide.pdf