How to Cite a Lecture in APA?

Writing essays and research papers is part and parcel of every student’s routine. In the process of research and paper preparation, learners face the need to give credit to the sources they’ve consulted during writing. Indeed, it’s hard to persuade the professor that you’ve always known all those dates, figures, and facts. And you actually don’t have to; it’s enough to use the correct format of reference citations, whether MLA or APA, to give credit to all external evidence you’ve used to make your essay fact-based and convincing.

APA is an acronym for the American Psychological Association, which has developed a manual for citing sources in educational, psychology, social sciences, and humanities works. This citation style is pretty easy to apply, as it only requires the knowledge of your source’s author and the date of its publication. The APA citations are placed in parentheses, either inside the sentence or at its end.

Here we’ll talk about the tricky material that escapes a regular citation format – lecture notes and presentations. How can you cite this form of educational material delivery using the APA conventions? And what are the shortcuts to citing lectures and presentations correctly without investing extra time and effort into the process? Let’s find out everything.

In a nutshell, an APA lecture citation is a reference to your professor’s lecture given in class or online, formatted in line with the APA referencing conventions. Since it’s an external piece of evidence you’re using in your work, it requires proper credit in the reference list.

A pro tip: if you want to cite a live lecture that you attended, it’s pretty simple to produce its correct citation by applying the APA format of citing speeches. All in all, the public delivery of a lecture is a form of a speech, and citing it as a speech will do for the academic paper.

To complete a lecture citation in full compliance with the APA style’s requirements, you need to do extensive research and record the following data about your source:

• The speaker’s name
• The speaker’s credentials (whether it’s a professor of your educational institution or an invited expert)
• Presentation’s full title
• The type of presentation (audio, video, live performance)
• The name of the institution in which the presentation was done
• The date of the lecture’s presentation
• The date of your access to these materials (if they are stored online and you’re citing the online version of that lecture)

It’s also helpful to store the lecture’s URL if the lecture you’re citing is not the one given to you by your professor. You can cite online lectures as well without a problem, but it’s essential to give exhaustive information about your source, including its location in the digital space.

Another benefit of having a URL for your lecture is that our online citation generator can apply advanced machine-learning algorithms and derive the information about that lecture by using the URL alone. This way, you will save much time and won’t need to scan the Internet for hours, looking for the lecture’s credentials and details for citing it in the APA format.

Now that you know what it takes to cite a lecture in the APA reference list, it’s time to learn to cite them properly in the text of your academic assignment. You need to refer to that external material in the text of your argument somehow, and that’s where the knowledge of the general APA format comes in handy.

The APA standard for citing sources is the author-date format. So, when referring to your lecture, you will need to cite it as follows:

(Johnson, 2017)

(Kennedy, 2005)

When referencing the lectures at the end of the paper, you will need to cite the sources as follows:

Kennedy, J. (2005, January 7). Essentials of macroeconomics [PowerPoint slides]. MIT University. http://blackboard.mit.edu

Speaking about APA format, PowerPoint presentations should also be mentioned as one of the formats in which lectures are delivered to students. Thus, when studying the conventions of APA format for lectures, you should also focus on the way of citing the PPT presentation materials of your professors. Here are a couple of pro tips for organizing this citation kind.

There is no problem in using APA to cite a PowerPoint lecture. As usual, you will only need to specify the type of document you refer to and indicate its format in the full citation. Here is an example of this should be done:

Johnson, J. (2017, June 15). An introduction to psychoanalysis [Lecture notes]. George Washington University. http://blackboard.gwu.edu

APA Format for Lecture Notes

Here are the additional details and peculiarities for citing the lecture notes you get from your professor via the university channels, like your Blackboard.

• You don’t need to include the long Blackboard URL in the citation if you have retrieved the lecture from the Blackboard. Only use the URL of Blackboard’s homepage.
• Always indicate the format in which the lecture notes are provided. It can be [PowerPoint slides] or [PDF Lecture Notes]. Always include that data in the square brackets after the lecture notes’ title.
• If you’re referring to your own lecture notes that you’ve taken during the lecture, they should be cited as personal communication in-text. At the end of the work, including the lecture’s full citation in the reference list.

Now, let’s proceed to the fun part and find out how your lecture and presentation citations can be generated automatically without extra input on your part. In fact, the process goes very smoothly and takes only a couple of seconds, which is a great timesaver for students with no time for studying the intricacies of APA formatting.

You can use our automatic citation generator that applies machine learning algorithms to create citations in compliance with all citation standards and formats. Thus, when you need to create a citation for a lecture given by your professor and want to make sure it will be fully compliant with APA standards, go to the offered tab and insert the following data.

• Specify the lecture’s title
• Indicate where it was delivered or published (the series or forum of its publication)
• Indicate all contributors (last and first name details)
• Provide all information about the live lecture’s performance – the title of the event at which it was delivered, the city and location of that event
• Indicate the date of the lecture (day, month, and year)

You should also specify that the lecture should be cited in APA 7^th edition and click “generate citation” after providing all the details. The system will generate a complete citation for you in a couple of seconds, leaving you with no more work to do other than copy the reference and insert it in your list of sources.

Another option (a simpler one, to be honest) is to give the lecture’s URL and let the system generate the citation with all relevant details on its own. However, we need to warn you that this approach works only for the sources that have already been published online and contain all speaker and event data in digital format. The method won’t work for the lecture notes that your professor shares with students via internal university channels or delivers live during your classes.