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How to cite using APA in the Health Sciences

Citing Emails and Other Forms of Personal Communication

Any work that cannot be retrieved by readers is cited in-text as personal communications. Some examples include:

  • Emails
  • Lectures and presentations (see exceptions for class materials below)
  • Text messages
  • Personal interviews
  • And others (see the longer list here)

Works that are not considered personal communications:

  • Quotes from research participants. Go to the page for quoting research participants to see how to format them.
  • Oral knowledge from Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers. APA recommends treating this as personal communication, however, there are more inclusive approaches that should be followed by visiting the page for citing Indigenous knowledge.

Personal communications are not included in the reference list. The elements required to cite personal communications are the name of the communicator, a personal communication note, and the date (as exact as possible).

Materials from Class Lectures and Presentations

If you are citing a lecture or presentation, you should ideally cite the research that the instructor based the lecture on. However, if the lecture or presentation contained original and/or unpublished content, cite the lecture as a personal communication.

If you are writing for an audience (e.g. classmates or instructor) that would have access to the PowerPoint slides or other presentation materials through a platform such as UMLearn, see how to format these works in Citing PowerPoint Slides.

Examples

Narrative Citation

Initial(s). Last Name (personal communication, Month Day, Year)

R. Dhillon (personal communication, May 14, 2023)

Parenthetical Citation

(Initial(s). Last Name, personal communication, Month Day, Year)

(M.-J. Kremer, personal communication, December 17, 2019)

Missing Information?

Don't leave it blank! Find out how to properly indicate that information is missing from one of your reference elements by reading more about missing information.

Acknowledgement

Information on this page was adapted from "Chapter 8: Works Credited in the Text", in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), as well as the APA webpage, "In-Text Citations".