ASA Format

This guide is intended as a quick reference to citing in a bibliography and in text some of common types of materials in the American Sociological Association publication format. Check with your instructor to learn more about the citation style required for your course or discipline.

Bibliography

Books

Habermas, Jurgen. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholosen. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960. Characteristics of Population, Vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Weber, Max. [1896] 1976. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, translated by R.I. Frank. London: NLB.

Periodicals

Merton, Robert K. 1985. "The Historicist/Presentist Diliemma: A Composite Imputation and a Foreknowing Response." History of Sociology 6:1 (Fall): 137-51.

Nelson, Benjamin. 1974. "Max Weber's 'Author's Introduction' (1920): A Master Clue to His Main Aims." Sociological Inquiry 44:4, 269-78.

Collections

Bachelard, Gaston. 1991. "The Abdications of Empiricism." Pp. 157-59 in The Craft of Sociology, edited by Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron (tr. Richard Nice). New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1980. "Max Weber and Edward Meyer." In Arnaldo Mamigliano, Sesto contributo alla storia delgi studi classici e del mondo antico, vol. 1. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Litteratura.

In-text Citations

References in the text cite the last name of the author and year of publication. Include page references whenever you think it would help the reader. Identify subsequent citations of the same source in the same way as the first. Examples:

If author's name is in the text, follow it with year in parentheses ["...Duncan (1959)."].
If author's name is not in the text, enclose the last name and year in parentheses ["...(Gouldner 1963)."].
Pagination follows year of publication after a colon ["...(Kuhn 1970: 71)."].
Give both last names for joint authors ["...(Martin and Bailey 1988)."].
Give all last names on the first citation in the text for more than two authors; thereafter use "et al." in the citation ["...(Carr, Smith, Jones 1962). And later...(Carr et al. 1962)."].
For institutional authorship, supply minimum identification from the beginning of the complete citation ["...(U.S. Bureau of the Census 1963: 117)..."].
Separate a series of references with semicolon ["...(Burgess 1968; Parson et al. 1971)..."]

More information can be found at http://www.calstatela.edu/library/bi/rsalina/asa.styleguide.html.

Learn more about Citing and Documenting Your Sources

This guide was compiled by Jason Capps, University of Kansas Writing Center, February 2002.

This page was last updated Tuesday, 13-Jul-2010 10:39:11 CDT