APA style

American Psychological Association (APA) style is a widely accepted style of documentation, particularly in the social sciences. APA style specifies the names and order of headings, formatting, and organization of citations and references, and the arrangement of tables, figures, footnotes, and appendices, as well as other manuscript and documentation features. APA style uses Harvard referencing, also known as the author-date system of citations and parenthetical referencing, keyed to a subsequent list of "References." The APA Publication Manual provides basic guidelines for documenting both print and electronic resources.

In reference citations in text are done using Harvard referencing. Most usually, this involves enclosing the author's surname and the date of publication within parentheses, separated by a comma, generally placed immediately after the reference or at the end of the sentence in which the reference is made. However, it is also common for the authors to be the subject or object of a sentence. In such a case only the year is in parenthesis. In all cases of citation, author name(s) are always followed immediately by a year, and years are never presented without author name(s) immediately preceding it. In the case of a quotation, the page number is also included in the citation.

Full bibliographic information is then provided in a Reference section at the end of the article. APA style defines that the reference section may only include articles that are cited within the body of an article. This is the distinction between a document having a Reference section and a bibliography, which may incorporate sources which may have been read by the authors as background but not referred to or included in the body of a document.