In the Author-Date system, citations are provided in the main text through parenthetical citations. Endnotes or footnotes may still be used to provide content supplemental to the main text, but these notes are not used for citations.
For Exact Quotes
Rule: The basic form of in-text citation consists of the author's (or editor's) last name and the year of publication of the work cited. No punctuation is used between the author's name and the date of publication. The page, section, or other element of the cited material follows the date and is preceded by a comma. Author-date citations are usually placed before a punctuation mark.
"The fight to save the banking system opened the Hundred Days; the fight to save the farmers opened the New Deal proper" (Schlesinger 1958, 87).
Rule: When quoting from a work by two or three authors, all names are included in the citation.
"Democracy in America has always been played roughly by all parties, and political adversaries have indulged in harsh and sometimes vicious assaults on each other since the nation's founding" (Conason and Lyons 2000, xiii).
Rule: When quoting from a work by more than three authors, use the name of the first author followed by et al. or and others.
"Studies of interpersonal functioning among individuals with bulimia nervosa consistently reveal issues of social dependency, need for approval, and fear of rejection" (Hayaki et al. 2003, 172).
Rule: When quoting from a work by an association, government agency, or corporation, the name of the group may serve as the author in the citation.
"To fulfill the Peace Corps mandate, men and women are trained for a 9- to 14-week period in the appropriate language, the technical skills necessary for their particular job, and the cross-cultural skills needed to adjust to a society with traditions and attitudes different from their own" (Office of the Federal Register 2002, 500).
Rule: In general, quoted material that runs more than one hundred words, or eight or more typed lines, is usually set off from the text (i.e. with indented margins). Quotation marks are not used in this case. The source of a block quotation is usually given in parentheses at the end of the quotation and after the final punctuation mark, so that it will not be read as part of the quotation.
McCullough lays out the contradictions between Truman's personal background and his presidency plainly:
Born in the Gilded age, the age of steam and gingerbread Gothic, Truman had lived to see a time of lost certainties and rocket trips to the moon. The arc of his life spanned more change in the world than in any prior period in history. A man of nineteenth century background, he had had to face many of the most difficult decisions of the twentieth century. A son of rural, inland America, raised only a generation removed from the frontier and imbued with the old Jeffersonian ideal of a rural democracy, he had to assume command of the most powerful nation on earth at the very moment when that power, in combination with stunning advances in science and technology, had become an unparalleled force in the world. (McCullough 1992, 991)
For Paraphrased Material
Rule: Writers need to give credit for words and ideas taken from others, even if the material used is not a direct quotation. In this case, a parenthetical reference in the text, keyed to the reference list, is sufficient. No quotation marks are required if the material is paraphrased.
There are some interesting juxtapositions of Islamic and democratic institutions in Malaysia (Feldman 2003, 114).