Citing With Multiple Authors
If you cite multiple works by the same author in the same parenthetical citation, give the authors name only once and follow with dates. No date citations go first, then years, then in-press citations. APA has different formatting for sources with one, two, and three or more authors.
See details and citation examples for each case. This guide will help you create in-text citations that correlate with the corresponding reference list citations. Please see Reference Examples for more details on the reference list.
For a work with one or two authors, include the author name (s) in every citation. For a work with three or more authors, include the name of only the first author plus et al. in every citation (even the first citation).
For sources with twenty-one or more authors, write out the first twenty authors on the References page, add an ellipsis (...), and end with the last author. For in-text citations, sources with more than twenty authors can be abbreviated to only the first author's last name followed by "et al." This guide introduces the APA referencing style and includes examples of citations
Reference list entries for books, journal articles, or any resource with multiple authors can include up to 20 authors' names before it is necessary to abbreviate. Multiple authors: APA contains special space-saving rules for sources with many authors. As of the 7th edition of the APA Handbook, citation rules change at 3 or more authors.
For all in-text citations with more than 2 authors, utilize et al. after the first listed author to conserve space. In-Text Citation What Is In-text Citation? In APA, in-text citations are inserted in the text of your research paper to briefly document the source of your information.
Brief in-text citations point the reader to more complete information in the References list. When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. If an author was the lead author for multiple publications that were published in the same year, the in-text citations would be identical.
To address this, the APA indicates that you should include as many names as needed to distinguish the sources before using "et al.".
