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APA: Citing Government Documents

Citation Generators - A Warning!

There are several free online citation generators that will make your Works Cited or Reference pages for you. Beware that these do not always format your sources correctly (there is a reason they are free). If you choose to use one of these tools, use the tabs at the top of the screen to check that they are correct before submitting your assignment. You don't want to lose points on your assignment because the AI generators were wrong!

APA Government Documents

We will focus on a couple of the most commonly cited government documents, but if you have questions about how to cite others, use the Ask the Library button on this page. 

U.S. Constitution

If you are citing details from the Constitution, APA requires you to cite the specific part of the constitution, such as an article or amendment. Use the abbreviation U.S. Const.

U.S. Const. article or amendment number abbreviated as art. or amend. Use Roman numerals.

Reference:

U.S. Const. art. II. 

U.S. Const. amend. XIX. 

In-text: (U.S. Const. art. II)

U.S. Supreme Court

For Supreme Court cases, APA wants you to use the information as provided in the United States Reports, found on the oyez.org website. You can Google the name of the court case and look for the result on Oyez.org. The last part of the URL link is the volume and page number, add spaces and capitalize U.S. In the example below the 347us483 in the link is the volume and page number. Convert it to 347 U.S. 483

Name of Case, Volume and page number (year). Link

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1945). https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/347us483

In-text citation: (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954)

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