Essay Writing Guide

Citing Sources

Almost all psychology essays are evidence based. This means that everything you say about the topic should be backed up by evidence. This can be illustrated by using one of our examples, "Discuss the different models of short term memory".A good essay would have outlined the different models of memory, citing the sources that were used and then described the experimental evidence for each theory. For example if one model predicts that different types of stimulus are remembered differently, is there experimental evidence to back this up? This illustrates one of the essential elements in psychological essays; providing evidence. Essays that do not provide evidence for what they say receive very poor marks.

One difficulty that students have is how to cite the sources of information and evidence within an essay. This section of the guide will attempt to do outline how this is done.

The Basics

In Psychology there is a fairly standard method of citing sources within text. It differs from other disciplines such as English or some of the physical sciences, and is set by the APA. The standard way to cite a source is best shown by example; if you wanted to outline what Baddeley said about short term memory and the information had been taken from his book; "Human Memory: theory and practice". What you could perhaps write is:


This also could be equally correctly be written as:



The main detail to remember is to give the name of the author of the source of information and its date of publication. These identify to the reader the author. The date is used to identify the source in the list of sources which you provide at the end of the essay (this is described in the next section).

If the source has two authors then use both the author's names each time you cite the source:


If your source has three or more authors then you provide the second names of all the authors when you first cite the source:


and there after you can shorten this to:


As has been said citing evidence is something that many students have difficulty with; the next page shows some of the common errors that are produced.