American Sociological Association 2022

Getting Your Citations Right in ASA Style

The American Sociological Association 2022 manual is the current standard for citation in sociology publishing. If you are writing a paper for most ASA journals or a graduate thesis in the field, this is what you will be graded or peer-reviewed against. It is not particularly complicated, but it has enough specific rules that people who have never used it before tend to make the same set of mistakes repeatedly. I have spent more years than I care to count fixing other people's reference lists. The system is author-date, which means your in-text citations look like (Smith 2018, 45) rather than a footnote or a numbered bracket. The number after the comma is the page, not the year. That trips people up constantly. You put the year in the citation only because the style is called author-date, but the page number for direct quotes is also required there. The reference list at the end is alphabetized by first author's last name. If there are multiple works by the same author in the same year, you add lowercase letters: 2018a, 2018b. The titles of journal articles go in sentence case, not title case. Only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns get capitalized. Book titles follow the same rule. This is one area where people default to their word processor's autopilot and capitalize everything, which is wrong for ASA 2022.

Here is what a standard journal article reference looks like: Johnson, Maria, and David L. Torres. 2020. "Social Capital and Educational Outcomes in Urban School Districts." American Sociological Review 85(3):412-439. The volume number comes first, then the issue in parentheses, then the page range. Do not write "pp." before the page range. That is a Chicago style habit that does not belong here.

The Stuff Nobody Teaches You

The ASA 2022 manual has some sections that are genuinely unclear even after you read them. One example is how to cite works with three or more authors. The old rule was to list all authors. ASA 2022 says list up to six authors in full, then for seven or more, list the first six followed by "et al." I wasted about twenty minutes on a single reference once because I had a source with exactly seven authors and my previous instinct was to just write "et al." from the start. Do not do that. List all six, then et al. Another thing that catches people off guard: when you cite a source that has no identifiable author, you alphabetize by the title's first significant word, not by the word "Anonymous" or "Anonymous." I found this out the hard way when a reviewer flagged my bibliography for incorrect alphabetical ordering. The entry for an anonymous report on housing policy ended up in the wrong spot because I had filed it under "A" for "Anonymous" instead of under "H" for "Housing." For online sources, ASA 2022 requires the access date only when the content is likely to change over time, like a live database or a social media post. For a static PDF or a published webpage that does not get updated, you do not need the access date. This is different from APA, which basically demands an access date for everything online. If you are switching between styles mid-paper, you will forget this distinction.

Practical Workflow for Getting It Done Efficiently

Zotero with the ASA style plug-in will handle about eighty percent of your citations correctly on the first try. The remaining twenty percent is usually the things I just described above. I keep a running habit file where I note down any reference that Zotero formats wrong so I can fix the underlying metadata instead of manually editing each one every time. A typical reference list for a thirty-page article takes me about forty-five minutes to clean up after Zotero generates the initial draft. If you are working with primary sources like interview transcripts or survey instruments, ASA 2022 has a specific format for those that most people skip. Personal communication citations go in the text only and do not appear in the reference list. So if you conducted an interview with someone in 2021, you write (M. Chen, personal communication, March 12, 2021) in the body and that is it. No entry at the back. Do not add it to your references just because you feel like it should be there.

When ASA 2022 Breaks Down

The style is not well-equipped for citing datasets, which is a growing part of sociology research. There is no clean template for a longitudinal survey dataset with a DOI. You can adapt the book chapter format, but it will look awkward. In those cases, many researchers simply switch to a Chicago-style footnote for the dataset citation while keeping ASA for everything else, though that is technically inconsistent. The ASA 2022 manual acknowledges this gap in a brief note on page 97 and suggests following the data repository's preferred citation format as closely as possible within the ASA framework. Another limitation: ASA 2022 does not handle non-Latin scripts well. If you are citing a source in Arabic, Chinese, or Cyrillic, the transcription rules are thin and largely guesswork. I have seen published papers where transliteration is inconsistent within the same reference list because the authors did not have clear guidance to follow.

Quick Reference for the Most Common Source Types

Journal article: Author Last Name, First Name. Year. "Article Title." Journal Title Volume(Issue):Page range. DOI or URL if applicable. Book: Author Last Name, First Name. Year. Book Title. Place of publication: Publisher. Book chapter: Author Last Name, First Name. Year. "Chapter Title." Pages in Book Title, edited by Editor First Name Editor Last Name. Place of publication: Publisher.

Website: Author Last Name, First Name. Year. "Page Title." Accessed Month Day, Year. URL. The website format is where most errors happen because people include the access date unnecessarily or omit it when they should. Use your judgment based on whether the page is likely to change. I spend most of my time now just doing quick sanity checks on reference lists rather than building them from scratch. Zotero and the ASA 2022 manual cover the basics well enough. The real value is in knowing where the edge cases are before a reviewer points them out to you.