Author-date System - Author-date - How To Cite

How To Cite

The structure of a citation under the author-date method is the author's surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Smith example near the top of this article.

• The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The author's surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say: "Jones (2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery."
• Two authors are cited using "and" or "&": (Deane and Jones, 1991) or (Deane & Jones, 1991). More than two authors are cited using "et al.": (Smith et al., 1992).
• In some documentation systems (e.g., MLA style), an unknown date is cited as having "no date of publication" by the abbreviation for "no date" (Deane, n.d.).
• In such documentation systems, works without pagination are referred to in the References list as "not paginated" with the abbreviation for that phrase (n. pag.).
• "No place of publication" and/or "no publisher" are both designated the same way (n.p.) and placed in the appropriate spot in the bibliographical citation (Harvard Referencing. N.p.).
• A reference to a republished work is cited with the original publication date either in square brackets (Marx 1967, p. 90) or separated with a slash (Marx, 1867/1967, p. 90). The inclusion of the original publication year qualifies the suggestion otherwise that the publication originally occurred in 1967.
• If an author published several books in 2005, the year of the first publication (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b and so on.
• A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself.
• Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as "Works cited" or "References." The difference between a "works cited" or "references" list and a bibliography is that a bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.
• All citations are in the same font as the main text.