Referencing Style for Quotes and In-Text Citations
Direct quotations are an important part of essay writing,
especially for complex concepts or for capturing the full meaning and nuances
which the original author intended. Make sure that you use direct quotes
sparingly unless you are writing a literature or poetry analysis, in which case
it’s important to show the original text so that the context can be fully
understood.
Direct quotes should always be placed in quotation marks,
and the in-text reference should be placed after the quotes but before the full
stop of the sentence. A direct quote will thus look as follows:
“Gene therapy has been shown to be effective in treating certain
types of developmental challenges” (Perry, 2014: 35).
The reference used in-text, or next to the direct quotes or
paraphrases, looks different to the reference you add in the bibliography or
reference list of your work. It will be shorter, and only contain limited
information. Most in-text references include the surname of the author, the
year that the work was published, and, in the case of direct quotes, the page
number from which the quote is taken. The style will differ slightly depending
on the referencing method you are using, but these components are almost always
present.
For in-text references, if some of the information is
included in another part of your sentence, you won’t have to repeat it between
brackets after the information. For example, if you give the name of the author
within the paraphrase, you won’t have to include the surname again in the
reference. See the example below for how certain information is included within
the body of your work:
Jonathan Perry explains that developmental challenges might be treated
through gene therapy (2014: 35).
In his book Understanding Gene
Therapy, published in 2014, Jonathan Perry explains that “[g]ene therapy
has been shown to be effective in treating certain types of developmental
challenges” (35).
Because the surname and year are included in the sentence,
it’s not necessary to repeat them.
Let’s look briefly at some of the most widely-used
referencing styles and how in-text citations look for each of them.