When citing a work in the text, it is helpful to be specific about what part of the work contains the relevant information. Cite specific parts of a source—for example, page ranges, tables, or figures—in the text in APA Style by adding information about the part to a standard in-text citation and writing a standard reference list entry. It is possible to cite a specific part of a source whether you are paraphrasing or directly quoting.
Do not cite a specific part of a source in the reference list. Instead, cite the work that readers would retrieve to find the part. For example, if you cite data from a table in a government report, the government report is the source, and the table is the part. Write a reference list entry for the government report source; then, in the text, write a standard in-text citation for the report (which means providing the government author and year of publication) and add location information for the table to the in-text citation (e.g., provide the table number or a page number for the table).
The following table provides some of the most common examples of parts of a source, including page ranges, chapters of authored books, tables and figures, and video time stamps for audiovisual media such as YouTube videos or films. There are many other possibilities—customize the wording to the work you are citing.
| Part | Example |
|---|---|
| Page | (Stoddard et al., 2020, p. 47) |
| Page range | (World Health Organization, 2019, pp. 202–205) |
| Chapter | (Merenda, 2018, Chapter 14) |
| Paragraph | (Liu et al., 2020, para. 3) |
| Paragraph range | (Bassie & Meagher, 2020, paras. 4–5) |
| Footnote | (Garcia et al., 2020, Footnote 2) |
| Table | (National Institute of Mental Health, 2019, Table 3) |
| Figure | (Lazer, 2020, Figure 4) |
| Time stamp in an audiovisual work | (Patel & Gupta, 2019, 1:09:19) |
| Chapter and verse in a religious work | (The Torah, 1962/2015, Exodus 1:1–6:1) |
| Content ID or page ID from an academic research database | (Svendsen & Løber, 2020, c373) |
Citing specific parts of a source is covered in Section 8.13 of the APA Publication Manual, Seventh Edition
This guidance has been expanded from the 6th edition.
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