While there are specific citation styles that we use in academic writing, you will likely have to show or cite your sources in some form regardless of the career you choose. For example, if you propose a budget for a project or department, you will have to demonstrate where your numbers are coming from and the cost of various items and services. If you submit a business plan to investors, you will show how comparable businesses in the area perform and how you will distinguish yourself from the competition. In almost any workplace, if you propose a new idea to your supervisors, you will need to explain why and how it will work, which often involves showing how that idea, or similar ideas, have worked elsewhere.

Many careers, including health occupations, psychology, and teaching, put a great deal of emphasis on evidence-based practice. That is, using methods or treatments that have been proven by experiments and testing to be beneficial. When you want to introduce a new technique to your workplace, you will need to provide that evidence.

Any time you are writing about or including information you wouldn't have known without reading, watching, or listening to a source other than yourself, you need to cite that source. This includes when you're using a direct quote or paraphrasing another's work.

When you fail to cite your sources, you are plagiarizing. Some other examples of plagiarism and/or academic dishonesty include:
- Taking credit for someone else's published or unpublished work
- Turning in an assignment in one class which you've already turned in for credit in another class
- Copying or buying another person's work, or otherwise having someone else do your work

There are two parts to APA citations: in-text citations, which are a brief notation of the author(s)' names and year of publication in parentheses in the body of your paper, and bibliographic citations with publication title, link or DOI, etc. on your references page.

If you don't mention the authors by name in the sentence, you will include their names and the date of publication at the end of the sentence, in parentheses, before the period. For example: Red efts are the juvenile stage of the eastern red-spotted newt and spend several years on land before they mature and return to the water (Hyde & Devlin, 2019).

If you do mention the author(s)' names in the sentence, you only need to include the year, in parentheses, directly after the name(s). For example: Phillips (2016) explored the correlation between staffing levels and nurses' self-reported mental health. Only include the authors' last names in your writing, not their first names or credentials.

Some other formatting examples:
- One author: (Lobdell, 2020)
- Two authors: (Kim & Harrington, 2020)
- Three or more authors: (Dolan et al., 2018).
- Corporate or organizational author: (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020)
- Undated work: (American Dental Association, n.d.)
- Citing a specific page: (Nañez-Bonilla, 2017, p. 56)
- Citing a page range: (McCarthy et al., 2016, pp. 20-24)

Any source that you cite in your paper as an in-text citation must also be cited as a full bibliographic citation on your references page. This will include information that another person would need in order to find your source and look at it themselves: author(s)' names and first initials, article/chapter/website title, journal/book/newspaper name, date, volume and issue number, URL or DOI (digital object identifier, a unique number for scholarly publications)

The citations on a references page are in alphabetical order by first author's last name and are formatted with a hanging indent, where the first line of each citation is flush with the margin and subsequent lines are indented.

See the image below for an example of an APA-formatted references page, in alphabetical order and formatted with a hanging indent. The word References is centered at the top of the page.