Citing tables and figures

• Figures may be a chart, graph, photograph, drawing, plot, infographic, or any illustration that is not a table.
• Tables are numerical values or text displayed in rows and columns.

Including figures or tables in your work

When including figures or tables in your work, please note:

• All figures and tables must be referred to in the main body of the text.
• Number all figures and tables in the order they first appear in the text.
• Refer to them in the text by their number. For example:

As shown in Table 4...

OR

As illustrated in Figure 3...

Example of an in-text Figure

Each figure should be accompanied by a concise title that provides a brief but clear explanation of its contents, this is presented directly below the figure number and above the figure itself. The title is given in Title Case and italics.

Figure 3

Figure or Table Title

• When reproducing a figure or table from another source you must also include an attribution (Creative Commons or copyright), presented in a Note directly below the figure/table.  The attribution will follow any explanatory notes required for the figure.
• An attribution for a figure reproduced from an Open Access journal article with a Creative Commons licence must include:
  • 'From' when reprinting the figure or 'Adapted from' when adapting
  • Title of article, in Title Case and double quotation marks " "
  • by Author(s). The first initial(s) followed by the surname
  • Year of publication
  • Journal title, in Title Case and italics
  • Volume (in italics) and issue number in (round brackets)
  • Page number of original figure. (Where there are no page numbers use Section headings and paragraph numbers)
  • DOI or URL, in (round brackets)
  • Creative Commons licence

Example:

Note. (A) Expression Recognition & (B) Expression Detection (A = Anger; D = Disgust; F = Fear; H = Happy; Su. = Surprise; Sa. = Sad). (C) Full confusion matrices underlying performance at each eccentricity for the Emotion Recognition Task (rows = expression presented; columns = response chosen). From "Identifying and Detecting Facial Expressions of Emotion in Peripheral Vision," by F. W. Smith and S. Rossit, 2018, PloS ONE, 13(5), Results section, Figure 1 (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197160). CC BY.

IMPORTANT: If a figure is not Open Access or Creative Commons, you may need to obtain written permission from the copyright holder to reproduce or adapt a figure or table. The copyright permission statement should be included at the end of the Note. See the APA Publication Manual pp. 389-391 for advice on copyright permission statements.

• You must also list the figure in your Reference list. Notice that the order of the citation elements and capitalisation differs slightly in the figure note compared to the reference list:

Discussion of a figure in another source

Follow a discussion of a figure viewed in another source (but not reproduced) with an in-text citation for the published source. Include the figure number as it appears in the published source. Cite the source in full in your reference list:

On analysing the recognition of different facial expressions at different degrees of eccentricity, Smith and Rossit (2018, Results section, Figure 1) found …

Reference List: