How to Cite Personal Communications and Emails

How to Cite Personal Communications: Quick Answer

Ask whether a reader who is not you can recover the same words. If the answer is no, APA 7 cites the exchange in the text only, MLA 9 still builds a works-cited entry with a description instead of a fake title, and Chicago 18 cites it in a note or parenthesis and almost never in the bibliography. Cite Them Right Harvard is the common exception: it does put emails and phone calls in the reference list. If the answer is yes — a public URL, a published transcript, an archived recording, a DOI — cite that recoverable container instead.

Start with recoverability, not the medium

An email, a Zoom interview, and a classroom lecture look like different source types. Citation styles treat them as one problem: can a reader who is not you retrieve the same words? If the answer is no, the source is a personal communication. If the answer is yes, cite the recoverable container instead.

The APA Style personal-communications page states the preference directly:

That sentence is the whole decision tree. A professor's claim that also appears in a journal article should be cited as the article. A public interview on NPR or YouTube is a published or broadcast interview, not a personal communication. A message sitting in your inbox is not recoverable, no matter how official the sender's title sounds.

• Not recoverable: private email, text, letter, memo, DM, phone or video call, live unrecorded speech, unrecorded webinar, unrecorded classroom lecture, nonarchived discussion-board post, intranet page your readers cannot open.
• Recoverable: magazine or newspaper interview, podcast or radio interview, YouTube or institutional recording, archived oral-history transcript, public social-media post, shared lecture slides with a stable URL.

For the published-interview templates themselves, use How to Cite Interviews in APA, MLA, and Chicago. For a single email in one style, start with How to Cite an Email in APA.

What counts as a personal communication

APA 7, section 8.9, lists the category as works readers cannot recover. The official examples include emails, text messages, online chats or direct messages, personal interviews, telephone conversations, live speeches, nonarchived social-media livestreams (Instagram Live, X Spaces), unrecorded webinars, unrecorded classroom lectures, memos, letters, and messages from nonarchived discussion groups or bulletin boards. Intranet sources belong here when readers outside the organization cannot open them.

MLA 9 and Chicago 18 do not use APA's label for every case, but they apply the same split. MLA still builds a works-cited entry for most unpublished interviews and messages. Chicago usually keeps ordinary correspondence in a note. None of the three styles treats a private inbox the way they treat a journal article.

APA 7th edition: in-text only

APA's rule is the one students most often get backwards. Because readers cannot retrieve the information, personal communications are not included in the reference list. They appear in the text only. Give the communicator's initial or initials and surname, the words personal communication, and as exact a date as possible. The official examples on the APA Style site are:

The same page, and APA's instructional aid Creating an APA Style Reference List, names personal communications as the explicit exception to the one-to-one match between in-text citations and reference-list entries:

What the APA template requires

• Use initials plus the surname (T. Nguyen), not a first name and not a bare surname.
• Keep the words personal communication in every citation. Do not substitute email or interview inside the parentheses unless your instructor asks for a local variant.
• Give Month Day, Year when you have it. An approximate date is better than none; a missing date is not a reason to invent a reference-list entry.
• Never add the email address, phone number, or a private URL. Those details do not make the source recoverable and they can violate privacy.
• If the same person later publishes the claim, cite the published work and drop the personal-communication citation.

Classroom lectures and intranet files

APA's own example is a lecture. If you learned a finding in class, cite the research the instructor based the lecture on. Cite the lecture as a personal communication only when the instructor offered original content that is not published elsewhere. The same logic covers LMS slide decks and intranet memos: if every reader of your paper can open the file, cite it as a recoverable classroom or intranet source; if they cannot, keep it in the text. The lecture templates live in How to Cite Lectures and Presentations in APA.

Do not cite your own research participants this way

APA draws a hard line in §8.36. Do not use a personal-communication citation for quotations or information from participants you interviewed as part of your own original research. Quote those participants in the text, follow the consent and confidentiality terms you already have, and do not put them in the reference list. A personal-communication citation is for a named communicator who is not a study participant — a colleague's email, an expert interview you did for background, an unrecorded guest lecture.

Traditional Knowledge and Oral Traditions

Section 8.9 also covers Traditional Knowledge or Oral Traditions of Indigenous Peoples. If the information has been recorded and readers can recover it — a video, transcript, book, or article — cite that source type. If you spoke with an Indigenous person who is not a research participant and the knowledge is not recorded, APA uses a variation of the personal-communication citation: full name, nation or group, location or other context, the words personal communication, and the date you consulted the person. Get agreement to include the name, and confirm that the information is accurate and appropriate to share. APA's official worked sentence is:

Capitalize names of specific groups and words related to Indigenous culture (Elder, Oral Tradition, Traditional Knowledge). Some stories are told only at certain times of year or by certain people and may not be appropriate to cite. CMOS 18 treats oral sources of Indigenous knowledge in a separate paragraph (14.136); do not force that material into a private-email template.

When the interview is published, stop using this rule

A magazine interview, a podcast episode, or a recorded conversation with a public URL is not a personal communication. Cite it as that published source. Worked examples for the published path are in How to Cite Interviews in APA and How to Cite an Interview in APA. The APA style page collects the rest of the APA 7 reference system.

MLA 9th edition: works-cited entries

MLA does the opposite of APA for most unpublished interviews and messages. Follow the MLA format template. Treat the person interviewed or the sender as the author. Put a description — not a fake title — in the Title of source slot. The MLA Style Center is explicit that an untitled interview uses the generic description interview (Handbook 5.23 and 5.28).

Unpublished interviews

If the interview is not contained in another work, list the interviewer's name in the Contributor element after the description and follow it with a comma. These are the official MLA Style Center examples:

In-text citations use the interviewee's surname: (Walcott), (Smith), (Redman). If the interview spanned consecutive days, style the dates as a range; if the days were not consecutive, list them as a series. MLA's own examples are 24-25 May 2016 and 3 and 6 Aug. 2017.

Emails, texts, and chat messages

Cite a text the way you would cite a letter: sender as author, a description in place of a title, the recipient in that description, then the date. The MLA Style Center text-message page and Handbook 5.23 prefer a description of the message over the subject line. Use the subject line only when you must tell two same-day messages apart. If two same-day emails share a subject line, the 13 March 2024 Style Center post uses the time the message was received (Handbook 5.80).

MLA's chat-tool note matters for Slack, Teams, and Discord. If you only discuss a conversation in general, you may mention it in prose or an endnote without a works-cited entry. If you quote or paraphrase a single message, create an entry. Do not include a private URL. For a channel post, name the workspace and channel in the description.

Anonymous interviewees: no works-cited entry

This is the MLA rule the current templates get wrong when they invent Anonymous. Personal interview. The MLA Style Center says:

Published interviews use the container

Once an interview appears in a book, journal, or website, cite that work. Treat the interviewee as the author and keep the interview title. MLA's published example is Ken Saro-Wiwa's "English Is the Hero." If you need the interviewer's name as a supplemental element, the Style Center adds it after the title:

More published-interview patterns are in How to Cite Interviews in MLA and on the MLA style page.

Chicago 18th edition: notes or text, rarely a bibliography

Chicago Manual of Style 18 (2024) splits the category across four paragraphs: unpublished interviews (14.108), interviews with people who wish to remain anonymous (14.109), published or broadcast interviews (14.110), and personal communications (14.111). Turabian 9th edition follows the same recoverability logic for student papers; it is not a third system. See Turabian vs Chicago if you need the student-manual difference.

Ordinary correspondence stays out of the bibliography

The two public Chicago citation guides use almost the same sentence, then diverge on whether the leftover documentation is a note or a parenthetical. The Notes and Bibliography Quick Guide says:

The Author-Date Quick Guide tightens the same rule for parenthetical citations:

Section 14.111 adds that most such information can be referred to simply as a conversation, message, or the like; mention the medium only when it is relevant. The official Author-Date Quick Guide example is Sam Gomez's Facebook direct message. Notes-bibliography uses the same elements in a numbered note:

Unpublished interviews you conducted (14.108)

Unpublished interviews are best cited in the text or in notes. They only occasionally appear in a bibliography. CMOS wants the names of the interviewee and the interviewer, brief identifying information if it helps, the place or date (or both), and — if a transcript or recording exists — where a reader can find it. Permission to quote may be required.

Those two rows are a slot schema, not a published source. If a transcript is on deposit, switch to the archived form. CMOS's long-standing unpublished-interview example — still the model for 14.108; the live Quick Guide shows only the published Buolamwini interview — is Benjamin Spock's 1974 oral-history interview:

That Spock interview is recoverable: a reader can request interview 67A from the Senn Oral History Collection at the National Library of Medicine. A conversation that exists only in your notes is not in the same class, even if you use the same note syntax.

Anonymous interviews (14.109) and published interviews (14.110)

If the interviewee must stay unnamed, Chicago cites the interview without a personal name and explains the reason in the text or a note. Do not invent a bibliography author called Anonymous. Published or broadcast interviews follow the pattern of the container — magazine, book, radio program, podcast — and are usually listed under the interviewee. The official CMOS 18 Author-Date published-interview example is Joy Buolamwini on Fresh Air:

A reader can open that NPR page. That is why it belongs in the reference list and this guide's personal-communication rule does not apply. Those templates belong in How to Cite Interviews in Chicago. Style-level Chicago help is on the Chicago style page.

APA vs MLA vs Chicago at a glance

Harvard, IEEE, and other author-date or numeric styles

Harvard is a family, not one manual. Cite Them Right 13th edition (2025), the version most UK and Irish libraries name, puts personal communications in the reference list. The Robert Gordon University Cite Them Right templates show the current form: sender, year in parentheses, the medium, the recipient, then day and month. In-text citations look like any other Harvard pair — (Kirk, 2024) — with no pers. comm. abbreviation.

Many Australian Harvard sheets do the opposite: they keep the details in the sentence as pers. comm. and omit the reference-list entry. Confirm the local Harvard guide before you copy either pattern. The comparison with APA is on Harvard vs APA; the Cite Them Right walkthrough is the Harvard referencing guide.

IEEE numbered style has no student handbook equivalent of APA §8.9. University IEEE sheets disagree about whether a private email gets a bracketed number. The recoverability test is still the right first move: if the reader cannot retrieve the message, do not invent a numbered reference that points nowhere. Put the communicator's name and date in the sentence. If your editor's IEEE template has a private communication type, follow that sheet — and still do not paste a private URL.

Ethics, permission, and confidential sources

A citation style can tell you where the name goes. It cannot give you permission to publish someone else's private words. Ask before you quote an email, a text, or an off-the-record conversation. Institutional review boards treat research interviews as human-subjects work; a class paper that names a patient, student, or employee can still be an ethics problem even when the citation format is perfect.

• Get permission before quoting private correspondence, especially if the sender did not write for publication.
• Keep a record of the date, medium, and the wording you relied on. APA and Chicago both ask for as exact a date as possible.
• Do not paste private URLs, addresses, or phone numbers into a paper or a shareable bibliography.
• Anonymize on purpose, not by inventing a fake author named Anonymous. MLA wants an endnote and no works-cited entry. Chicago 14.109 omits the personal name. APA describes the role in the sentence.
• Follow the consent form you already have. If a participant asked not to be identified, a perfectly formatted personal-communication citation is still a breach.

When to replace a personal communication

Personal communications are weak evidence because readers cannot check them. Use one when the information is unique, essential, and unpublished. Otherwise, swap it for a source a reviewer can open:

• A published interview, oral-history transcript, or press briefing instead of a private conversation.
• An agency report, dataset, or Federal Register notice instead of a staff email that restates those numbers.
• A recorded webinar, conference paper, or lecture video instead of an unrecorded talk. See How to Cite Lectures in APA.
• A public social-media post instead of a direct message. See Citing Social Media.
• A shared, retrievable AI chat instead of a private prompt log. See How to Cite ChatGPT and AI Tools; Chicago 14.112 is the AI companion to 14.111.

Official sources

The examples in this guide are the ones the style authorities publish. Use these pages when a professor asks where a form comes from:

• APA Style: Personal communications (Publication Manual §8.9; Paradis, Nguyen, and Grant examples).
• MLA Style Center: How do I document an interview? (Walcott; Saro-Wiwa; Teilanyo).
• MLA Style Center: How do I cite an interview conducted by e-mail? (Smith / Green).
• MLA Style Center: How do I cite a text message? (Brown).
• MLA Style Center: How do I cite several e-mails sent on the same day? (Yamada; Willis).
• MLA Style Center: How do I cite a conversation in a chat tool? (Slack: Smith, Davis, Cooper).
• MLA Style Center: How do I cite a personal interview when the interviewee wishes to remain anonymous?.
• Chicago Manual of Style: Notes and Bibliography sample citations (14.111; Gomez note).
• Chicago Manual of Style: Author-Date sample citations (14.111; Gomez 2024; Buolamwini).
• Robert Gordon University: Cite Them Right Harvard personal communications (Kirk; O'Connor).

Related guides and tools

• Email citation generator
• Interview citation generator
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• How to Cite an Email in MLA
• How to Cite an Email in Chicago
• How to Cite Interviews in APA
• How to Cite Interviews in MLA
• How to Cite Interviews in Chicago
• How to Cite Lectures in APA
• Citing Social Media: Complete Guide
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• Harvard referencing guide
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