Research Guides: APA 6th Edition: Electronic Image

About Citing Figures and Images

For each type of source that you might copy or adapt a figure from (i.e. a book, journal article, or website), both a general form and an example are provided.

Information on citing and several of the examples in this guide were drawn from the APA Manual (6th ed.).

Numbers in parentheses refer to specific pages in the manual.

Image from an Electronic Source

Note:

Images used in an academic paper must be accompanied by a copyright statement.. A copyright statement is a caption that includes the image's copyright information and, if necessary, a statement of permission for use.

Assume an image is under copyright unless it appears with the words public domain, or the image was produced by the U.S. Government (in which case it is automatically in the public domain). Creative commons licenses (sometimes indicated by the words CC) generally allow you to use the work without permission, so long as you give credit to the original author in the form of a copyright statement (see below).

You may need to seek permission from the copyright holder unless your writing falls under "fair use", such as an academic work and not for profit (such as a paper for a class or publication in an academic journal).

Below are some guidelines for formatting both parts of your image citation: the caption and the entry that should appear in the list of references. Use the template/example that corresponds to the source of your image (website, article, book, etc.)

See the APA Style Blog's Navigating Copyright for Reproduced Images for more detailed information.

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