Projects like this are a synthesis of information from a wide variety of resources.  We need to give credit to the sources we used to form our opinions and solutions. Plagiarism, whether you copy a paragraph from a book or cut and paste someone else's words from an e-mail, is a violation of Penn State's academic integrity policy. We also want to allow the reader or viewer of our project to investigate those sources themselves. 

You give credit by citing the source. Make sure your citation contains everything you would need to backtrack and find the information again.

Properly formatted references assist the reader in determining if they want to read that source themselves.

Hint: It is not appropriate to simply list a URL because a URL in and of itself does not give anyone enough information to judge the quality and relevance of that source.

What does this URL tell you?

http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.17730/humo.64.1.j8ad5ffqqktq102g

not much.

How about this reference?  

Moberg, M. (2005). Fair trade and eastern Caribbean banana farmers: Rhetoric and reality in the anti-globalization movement. Human Organization, 64 (1), 4-15.  Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.17730/humo.64.1.j8ad5ffqqktq102g

much more!

The basic APA format is 

Author. (year). Article title if this is an article. Journal or magazine or newspaper or webpage or book title, including volume if appropriate. Page numbers if appropriate. URL or DOI if appropriate.

At a minimum, a citation should include:  Author(s); Title (e.g. Fair trade and eastern Caribbean banana farmers: Rhetoric...) and year.

Remember, organizations can be used as a "corporate author" if not other author is obvious.

In-Text Citations: Within the paper, you will use an "in-text" citations to let your reader know what source provided that information. 

It is easiest to create the entry in your final reference list first, and then derive the in-text citation from that.

Your in-text citation should lead your reader to the corresponding entry in the reference list.  Since your final reference list is arranged alphabetically by author, your in-text citation uses the author and date.  

For example:

"Fair trade banana production results in an increase in labor costs for the grower, without a corresponding increase in returns (Moberg, 2005)”.

Items without an author use the title for alphabetizing so you would use the title in your in-text citation.

For example:

Ecuador is a leading exporter of bananas (Banana statistics, 2019).

Hint: Cite websites in text as you would any other source, which means you use the author if one is available (remember, the organization can be the author), and if no author is available, use the website title.  

Web pages should include the URL. If the author and publisher are the same, omit the publisher. Example:

Articles also should include the name of the journal/magazine (e.g. Food Policy) and the pages or article number.  Example:

Books should also include the publisher. Example:

Special Circumstances:

• If no author, use title as the start of the citation
• Anytime you want to cite web pages found on an organization's web site, unless there is a specific author listed, use the organization name as the author.
• If no date, use n.d.

Hint: If you use a graphic from a statistics database (such as FAOSTAT Database), label the graphic with the source (ie. Source: FAOSTAT), and include FAOSTAT in your bibliography, including the month, day and year with the date you retrieved the data. Example: