Citation and Documentation
APA Format
(APA format is not generally used in philosophy journals or books. We are including it in this writing guide because some philosophy faculty allow students to use any citation format with which students are familiar, and many students have learned APA.)
- In-text citation gives the author of the source (often in a signal phrase), the date of publication, and at times the page number in parentheses.
- At the end of the paper, a list of references provides publication info about the source; the list is alphabetized by the authors' last names (or by titles for works without authors).
Example of in-text citation in APA format:
In the dialogue Phaedo in Plato's Five Dialogues (2002), Socrates lists qualities that should enable courage before death: "A man should be of good cheer about his own soul, if during life he has ignored the pleasure of the body and its ornamentation as of no concern to him and doing him more harm than good, but has seriously concerned himself with the pleasures of learning, and adorned his soul not with alien but with its own ornaments, namely, moderation, righteousness, courage, freedom, and truth, and in that state awaits his journey to the underworld" (p. 151).
Then, in your Works Cited list, you would include:
Plato. (2002). Phaedo. Five Dialogues. (G.M.A. Grube, Trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Inc.
Example of paraphrasing in APA format (from R. Cherubin, "Aletheia from Poetry into Philosophy: Homer to Parmenides," forthcoming in W. Wians, ed., Mythos and Logos, SUNY Press):
The problem is that dike seems to enforce accounts of what is that are incompatible with one another. Inquiry, especially if it is understood to be oriented toward aletheia, seems to require the same things. As Cole (1983) and Constantineau (1987) have argued, to give the aletheia concerning something is to say what is the case, as it is, without distortion, omission, or embellishment. To do this, one must be present the thing in its proper context. At least in Parmenides' contemporaries Pindar and Bacchylides, that involves tracing it to its origins, showing how and why it is as it is.
Page numbers are not included because the paragraph is summarizing work from the whole of a short article. If you are referring to a specific section of a book or article, you need to indicate the pages involved.
The Works Cited list for the paper to which this paragraph belongs would include:
Cole, T. (1983). Archaic truth. Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, 42, 1983, 7-28.
Constantineau, P. (1987). La question de la vérité chez Parménide. Phoenix, 41, 1987, 217-240.
The only difference between APA and MLA formats, as far as the format for in-text citation is concerned, is that in APA the latest copyright date is in parenthesis after the author/work, and the page number in parentheses has the letter 'p' and a period preceding the number.