After spending hours poring over journal articles and books, you’ve finally found the perfect quotation to include in your research paper. It’s eloquently written; it’s rooted in facts; and it supports the primary theme of your work. But there’s one small catch: There’s a citation smack-dab in the middle of the quotation.

Don’t worry. The citation isn’t a stumbling block, and it shouldn’t make you reluctant to include the quotation in your paper. As always, the APA provides guidance for this exact situation.

If the citation appears anywhere other than the end of the quotation, there are only two steps to follow:

1. In your paper, include the citation within the quotation.
2. Do not include the work cited in the quotation on your reference page unless you also cite it as a primary source elsewhere in your paper.

For example, let’s take a look at this (fictional) passage:

Archaeological studies “can sometimes draw inspiration from folklore (Copperpot, 1932) as even stories widely regarded as fairy tales are thousands of years old” (Walsh et al., 1989, p. 368).

In this example, Walsh et al. (1989) would appear on your reference page. The Copperpot citation would not.

Pro Tip: Footnote or endnote number callouts in a quotation can be omitted.

What if the citation appears at the end of the quotation?

In the previous example, if the (Copperpot, 1932) citation had appeared at the end of the quotation, the solution would have been as simple as ending the quotation prior to the Copperpot citation.

“If citations appear at the end of material you want to quote, it is common practice to end the quotation before the citations and to cite only the work you read,” Section 8.32 of the APA 7 manual states. “It is appropriate to omit the citations at the end of a quotation when the material you quote represents a new approach to or conceptualization of the ideas presented in the cited works—for example, when authors have summarized a body of work and you want to quote and cite that summary.”

And with that, you’re ready to include the perfect quotation you discovered in your paper, properly formatted and attributed. Until next time, good writing! And remember, PERRLA has all your formatting covered (even the obscure stuff).