Nontraditional Sources: Citing Sources With the Same Author and Year

Last updated 7/9/2016

 

Visual: The words “Walden University Writing Center” and the Walden University Writing Center logo on a blank page of a notebook with a pencil. The slogan “Your writing, grammar, and APA experts” appears. The screen shifts to present the words “Nontraditional Sources” with the title “Citing Sources with the Same Author and Year” underneath.

Audio: Music plays.

 

Visual: A slide appears with the title “Sources with the Same Author/Year.” Underneath, there is a sample piece of a reference page. There are two sources listed:

Institute of Education Sciences. (2013a). Methodological resources. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/funding/resources.axp

Institute of Education Sciences. (2013b). Peer review process. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/director/sro/peer_review/index.axp

An arrow points the year in the first entry, (2013a), with a box attached saying “lower-case letters.”

Audio: Sources that have the same author and the same year. Sometimes you might have a source that has multiple web pages, or maybe it's a same source that's authored several books and in the same year even, and you want to use all of those sources.

If I looked at my reference list, I'd have the same author and the same year, and that would be confusing in my in-text citations if I just put the Institute of Educational Sciences, 2013, how would I know which one of these it's referring to? I wouldn't.

So in that case, we include lower case letters with the year of publication. The first one would be 2013a, the second one would be 2013b.

Notice for the alphabetical order, we start with the title, “Methodological resources” or “Peer review process”. Because M comes before P, the “Methodological resources” would be listed first in that reference list.

 

Visual: A green box appears at the bottom of the same slide, with two example parenthetical citations inside. They read: (Institute of Education Sciences, 2013a) and (Institute of Education Sciences, 2013b).

Audio: And you can see what these in-text citations would look like. This is an example of what we were talking about with an organization listed as the author. Here there's no specific one person that's the author, so the Institute of Education Sciences is the authoring organization. And then you'll see the year as well, 2013a or 2013b.

 

Visual: The words “Walden University Writing Center” and the Walden University Writing Center logo on a blank page of a notebook with a pencil. In the middle it says, “Questions? E-mail writingsupport@mail.waldenu.edu.”