Lectures are useful sources of information in academic writing. But how do you cite a lecture or lecture notes using APA referencing? In this post, we will explain the basics of in-text citations and reference list entries for published lecture notes, video recordings of lectures, and unrecorded lectures.
APA is an author–date referencing system, which means that you cite sources by giving the author’s surname and the date of publication in the text. For published lecture notes, this means citing the person who prepared the lecture notes (usually the same person who gave the lecture) and the year of the lecture:
For Jones (2016), balanced literacy is vital.
Balanced literacy requires equal input and output (Smith, 2019).
In the reference list, meanwhile, you would list published lecture notes as follows:
Surname, Initial(s). (Year, date of publication). Title of lecture [Format of notes]. Name of site where notes are available. URL
Therefore, we would list the lecture notes above accordingly:
Jones, J. (2016, March 23). Guided reading: Making the most of it [PowerPoint slides]. SlideShare. https://www.slideshare.net/hellojenjones/guided-reading-making-the-most-of-it
Smith, T. (2019, October 30). Lecture 1: Introducing balanced literature [PDF lecture notes]. School of Education, University of Somewhere. https://www.universityofsomewhere.ac.uk/education/lecture-notes/smith/balanced-literature
However, this only applies if the lecture notes have been made available after the fact (e.g., via a college website). To cite a lecture directly, see the options below.
For a video recording of a lecture, the rules are a little different. Rather than citing the person who gave the lecture, you will need to cite the account that uploaded the video lecture to the host site. For example, if you were citing this video, you would cite “YaleCourses” as the author (not “Fry,” the lecturer):