General Business 360 Research Guide

Attributive tags, which are also called signal phrases, alert the reader that you are beginning to paraphrase or quote a source. Attributive tags also demonstrate the authority of your sources; giving proper credit to your sources demonstrates careful research and distinguishes your ideas from those of your source authors.

Approaches to Attribution - APA Style

The following sentences show different ways of providing attribution in APA. 

According to Kanter’s (2016) New York Times article, the E.U. plans to nearly double military spending in the next year.

A recent New York Times article reported that the E.U. plans to nearly double military spending in the next year (Kanter, 2016).

James Kanter (2016) explained that the E.U. plans to nearly double military spending in the next year.

Approaches to Attribution - Embedded Hyperlinks

For emails and other digital documents, hyperlinks provide readers with a direct, convenient way to access the sources you’re citing.

In most word-processing applications (including Outlook, Gmail, Word, and Google Docs), you can create formatted hyperlinks by highlighting the text you want to make into a link, right-clicking/control-clicking, choosing the “link” or “add link” option, and pasting in the appropriate URL.

You can hyperlink the attributive verb, the name of the publication, the title of the article, or the names of the authors. Use hyperlinks and attributions to emphasize whatever will best suit your audience and purpose.

Raffaella Sadun, Joseph Fuller, Stephen Hansen, and PJ Neal of Harvard Business Review reported on a recent study of 5,000 C-suite job descriptions.

As the July-August 2022 issue of Harvard Business Review explains, the workplace has evolved so that “strong social skills” are essential for both new employees and members of the C-suite. These include “a high level of self-awareness, the ability to listen and communicate well, a facility for working with different types of people and groups.”

In “The C-Suite Skills that Matter Most,” Harvard Business Review explains the way that the changing workplace environment demands not just technical skills, but also people skills, especially “what psychologists call ‘theory of mind’—the capacity to infer how others are thinking and feeling.”

Verbs for Attributive Tags

When your tag or signal phrase includes a verb, choose one appropriate for the context. Is your source arguing a point, making an observation, reporting a fact, drawing a conclusion, refuting an argument, or stating a belief? By choosing an appropriate verb, you make your source’s stance clear. In APA, sources are usually referred to in past tense.