Sociology
ASA Citation Generator
Create accurate ASA references for journal articles, books, chapters, reports and datasets. Paste a DOI, ISBN, URL, or title to get started.
Based on the ASA Style Guide, 6th edition
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ASA cites by author and year
The reference list is alphabetical, and the text points at it with the author surname and the year, adding a page number after a colon when you quote.
- Paraphrase
- (Granovetter 1973)
- Direct quotation
- (Granovetter 1973:1364)
ASA citation examples by source type
The year comes straight after the author, journal names are given in full, and the page range follows the volume and issue with a colon and no space.
Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology 78(6):1360–1380.
Volume, issue in parentheses, then a colon and the pages, with no spaces: 78(6):1360–1380.
DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell. 1983. "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." American Sociological Review 48(2):147–160.
Only the first name is inverted. The second stays in normal order.
Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls. 1997. "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy." Science 277(5328):918–924.
All three are named in the reference list. In the text this becomes (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997) first, then (Sampson et al. 1997).
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Article." Journal Name 12:100–125.
Books give the city and publisher after the italic title. The state or country is added only when the city could be ambiguous.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Last, First. YYYY. Title of Book. 3rd ed. City: Publisher.
Last, First, ed. YYYY. Title of Book. City: Publisher.
Last, First. [1922] YYYY. Title of Book. Translated by First Last. City: Publisher.
Square brackets carry the original date, which matters when the argument is historical.
Chapters name the pages before the book, not after: "Pp. 100–125 in Title of Book, edited by …".
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Chapter." Pp. 100–125 in Title of Book, edited by F. Last. City: Publisher.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Chapter." Pp. 100–125 in Title of Book, Vol. 2, edited by F. Last. City: Publisher.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Chapter." Pp. 100–125 in Title of Book, edited by F. Last. City: Publisher. Originally published in YYYY.
Online sources end with the retrieval date and the URL in parentheses. ASA wants both, not one or the other.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Page." Site Name. Retrieved Month DD, YYYY (https://example.com/page).
Name of Organisation. YYYY. "Title of Page." Retrieved Month DD, YYYY (https://example.com/page).
Name of Organisation. N.d. "Title of Page." Retrieved Month DD, YYYY (https://example.com/page).
Agency reports and public datasets are standard sociological sources and are cited by the issuing body.
Name of Agency. YYYY. Title of Report. City: Name of Agency. Retrieved Month DD, YYYY (https://example.com/report).
Principal Investigator, First Last. YYYY. Title of Dataset. Distributor. Retrieved Month DD, YYYY (https://example.com/data).
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Paper." Working Paper No. 1234. Institution, City.
Unpublished work names the department and institution, which is what tells a reader it was never peer reviewed.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Dissertation." PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University Name, City.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Thesis." Master's thesis, Department of Sociology, University Name, City.
Last, First. YYYY. "Title of Paper." Presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Month DD, City.
Build your ASA bibliography
- Brown, Tom B., Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, and Arvind Neelakantan. 2020. "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33:1877–1901.
- He, Kaiming, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. 2016. "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition." Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition:770–778.
- Jinek, Martin, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier. 2012. "A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity." Science 337(6096):816–821.
- Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. "Attention is All You Need." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30:5998–6008.
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- Style-aware sorting Ordered and numbered for your style.
ASA citation rules at a glance
- Reference order Alphabetical by author surname, not by order of appearance.
- In-text citations Author and year in parentheses. A page follows a colon with no space: (Granovetter 1973:1364).
- Author names The first author is inverted, the rest are not: Sampson, Robert J., Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls.
- Three or more authors All are named in the reference list. In the text, name all three the first time, then use et al.
- Year after the author The publication year comes straight after the name, before the title.
- Journal names in full American Journal of Sociology, never AJS. Volume, issue and pages run together: 78(6):1360–1380.
Checked against the ASA Style Guide, 6th edition · Last reviewed August 2026
Read our methodologyCommon ASA citation mistakes
- Numbering the reference list ASA lists sources alphabetically without numbers. Numbering is the numeric-style habit.
- Putting the year at the end The year belongs immediately after the author, which is what makes an author-date list scannable.
- Writing a comma before the page number ASA uses a colon and no space: (Granovetter 1973:1364).
- Inverting every author name Only the first author is inverted. The rest are in normal order.
- Using et al. in the reference list Et al. belongs in the text after the first mention. The reference list names everyone.
- Omitting the retrieval date for a web source ASA wants both the retrieval date and the URL, in parentheses at the end.
ASA quick reference (one page, PDF)
Element order for every source type sociology uses, including datasets and working papers, plus the in-text forms with and without page numbers. Print it, or hand it to a methods seminar.
- Reference patterns for eight source types, datasets included
- In-text forms for one, two, three and four or more authors
- Where the colon goes, and where it does not
- How reprints and translations carry their original date
ASA citation generator FAQ
Is this ASA citation generator free?
Yes. Generate, copy, save, and export ASA citations without signing up. There is no paid tier and no export limit.
How is an ASA reference list ordered?
Alphabetically by the first author surname. Several works by the same author are ordered by year, oldest first. Our builder sorts the list for you when ASA is selected.
What does an ASA in-text citation look like?
Author surname and year in parentheses: (Granovetter 1973). For a quotation, add the page after a colon with no space: (Granovetter 1973:1364).
When do I use et al. in ASA style?
In the text, not the reference list. With three authors, name all three the first time and use et al. afterwards. With four or more, use et al. from the first mention. The reference list always names everyone.
How do I cite a dataset or a government report?
By the issuing body or the principal investigator, with the retrieval date and URL in parentheses. The report and dataset tab has the patterns.
Where does the citation metadata come from?
Crossref for DOIs and Open Library for ISBNs. Nothing is written by a language model, so a volume or page range is either verified or left blank for you to fill in. See our methodology.
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