In APA, when a direct quote has a question mark at the end, do I still put a period after the parentheses of the in-text citation?

Answered By: Alyssa Mitchell

Last Updated: Feb 28, 2018 Views: 40351

When you are ending a sentence with a direct quote that ends in a question mark, you will need to have a period after the parenthetical citation. Since it is a direct quote, you will need to have a citation to show exactly where you got the quote. Here are a couple of examples:

Ex. One common question is "Do you consider this role to have a greater emphasis on counseling or marketing?" (Ziegenfus, 2015, p. 4).

According to Ziegenfus (2015), a common question asked is, "Do you consider this role to have a greater emphasis on counseling or marketing?" (p. 4).

Comments (4)

Here's what I found: http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/tutorials/apatutorial/punctuation.html
by Chris Palmen on Feb 27, 2018.
Thank you for providing a link to a good resource on punctuation marks and quotations. For this question in particular, the use of a quote that ends in a question mark can be tricky for students in terms of where to put the punctuation mark in conjunction with the APA in-text citation. As the link you provided verifies, you are supposed to include the question mark within the quotations since it is a part of the actual quote. If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to stop by the library!
by Alyssa Mitchell on Feb 28, 2018.
The link provided is no longer is available. The answer I'm looking for is that once the quote is ended with the question mark inside, is a period used after the citation?
?" (x, y). or ?" (x, y) ~ no period
by Reggie on May 06, 2018.
Reggie,
In regards to your question about whether to use a period after the citation or not, it is common practice to place a period after the citation. Looking at the examples above, you will see that they both have the period at the end of the citation:
?" (Ziegenfus, 2015, p. 4).
?" (p. 4).
I hope this helps! If you have any further questions about this, please don't hesitate to stop by the library!
by Alyssa Mitchell on May 07, 2018.