Attribution and citation in in-text citations
In-text citations point you to the work (article, book or media) that the author used.
Read through this paragraph from the introduction of the Myrick1 article
Internet users spend so much time with cat-related media they have turned household tabbies into celebrities. “Perma-kitten” Lil BUB has nearly 1.5 million Facebook fans and the constantly-frowning Grumpy Cat makes more money than many prominent human celebrities (Millward, 2014). Beyond famous cats, Internet users frequently post images of their own felines on social media platforms (Marshall, 2014), further increasing the amount of online cat-related visual content available to Internet users. In fact, industry research indicates that Internet users are more than twice as likely to post pictures or videos of cats than they are to post a “selfie” (i.e., a picture taken of oneself) online (Williams, 2014).
If you are interested in finding out more information about one of the sources that the author cited in their literature review, you can look at reference list at the end of the article.
For example, Myrick cites (Millward, 2014) to support the claim that cat-related media has turned cats into celebrities. We can then go through the reference list (in alphabetical order) to find the full citation to Millward’s article.
Millward, D. (2014). Grumpy cat makes owner £64 million. The Telegraph. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11278333/Grumpy-cat-makes-owner-64-million.html>
Additionally, Myrick uses different attribution with each distinct source she uses. For Millward’s and Marshall’s work she uses the parenthetical in-text citation at the end or the middle of her sentences, but for Williams’ work, she adds in a signal phrase “Industry research indicates” at the beginning of her sentence.
Now, learn more about how authors show the conversation through quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing →
1. Myrick, Jessica Gall. “Emotion Regulation, Procrastination, and Watching Cat Videos Online: Who Watches Internet Cats, Why, and to What Effect?” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 52, no. C, 2015, pp. 168–176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.06.001
