Citation Styles

Created by the American Psychological Association, APA style is most commonly used in the social sciences. The official guide to APA style is the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed. (2020). The FGCU Library owns several copies. Click on the link below to see locations.

Citation generators will automatically create a citation based on the information you provide.  Please be sure to input information correctly and double check the citation using the official citation guide or a reputable site, such as Purdue OWL. 

There are are a few assignments in the COE program in which students need to cite confidential school documents or district resources, such as interview questions, or hiring rubrics.

Here are a few options when citing these documents:

• If you are just using the questions, cite the documents as "personal communication" since they not retrievable by anyone else. See this helpful page from the Baker Library.  
• Alternatively, discuss "suitably disguised" information in the text without citing it. In the APA 7 manual, p. 278, 8.36 - bottom of the page - it has a good discussion on using confidential school documents. It says not to cite in text or list in the reference list at all, but "it may be possible to discuss information from these sources in the text if the material is suitably disguised."  There is a good paragraph at the bottom of the page in the APA manual that has a good example of this, using school documents. If you have your manual handy, I encourage you to look at that paragraph at the bottom of p. 278. Please also feel free to ask the FGCU Writing Lab if you have specific questions.