The OWL at Purdue University

OWL Resource

OWL at Purdue Logo

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/). When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at bottom.

From the OWL resource Formatting in Sociology (ASA Style)

This resource was written by Reece McGee and Muriel Harris.
Last full revision by Dana Lynn Driscoll.
Last edited by Dana Lynn Driscoll on July 26th 2006 at 5:54PM

Jump to listing of all of this resource's sections

In-Text References

In-text Reference Formatting

Include page references when you directly cite the authors words and when you think it will help the reader. Later references to the same source are cited in the same way as the first.

Cite the last name of the author and year of publication.

Quotations in the text should give page references. Block quotations (direct quotations of more than 40 words) should be offset from the main text. Do not include quotation marks with block quotes.

In-text References

If the author's name is in the text, put the date in parentheses:

When Duncan (1959) studied...

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

When these relationships were studied (Gouldner 1963)...

Pagination follows the year of publication after a colon:

As tabulated by Kuhn (1970:71) the results show...

For joint authors, give both last names:

(Martin and Bailey 1988)...

For three authors, give all last names in the first citation in the text; afterwards use the first name and et al.; for four or more names, use the first author's last name plus et al.:

(Carr, Smith, and Jones 1962)...(Nilson et al. 1962)...

For institutional authorship, supply minimum identification from the beginning of the complete citation:

(U.S. Bureau of the Census 1963:117)...

Separate a series of references with a semicolon and alphabetize:

(Burgess 1968; Marwell et al. 1971)...

For unpublished papers, cite the date. If no date is given, use n.d.:

Jones (n.d.)...

For machine-readable data files, cite authorship and date:

...(Institute for Survey Research 1976).

All Sections in Formatting in Sociology (ASA Style): In-Text References:

  1. Manuscript Formatting
  2. In-Text References
  3. References Page Formatting
Copyright ©1995-2008 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. Please report any technical problems you encounter.