Ever found yourself staring at a journal article, ready to cite it, but feeling a bit lost in the APA wilderness? You're not alone. It's like trying to assemble IKEA furniture without the instructions – doable, but prone to frustration. Let's break down how to cite a journal article in APA style, making it feel less like a chore and more like a conversation.
At its heart, citing a journal article in APA is about providing a clear roadmap for your reader to find the exact source you used. Think of it as leaving a breadcrumb trail. You'll need a few key pieces of information: the author(s), the year it was published, the title of the article itself, the name of the journal it appeared in, the volume and issue numbers, and crucially, the page range. And if you can find it, a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or a URL is your golden ticket to ensuring your reader can access it online.
The Anatomy of a Reference List Entry
Let's look at the building blocks. For a print journal article, the article title is written in sentence case – meaning only the first word and any proper nouns or words after a colon are capitalized. The journal title, however, gets the star treatment: it's in title case and italicized, and the volume number joins it in italics. The issue number, while important, usually isn't italicized.
So, a typical reference list entry might look something like this:
Author Surname, F. M. (Publication Year). Article title: Subtitle. Journal Title, Volume(issue), page range. DOI or URL
For instance, if you were citing a piece by Crowley from 2017, it would appear as:
Crowley, F. (2017). Firm subsidies in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia: Is there urban bias? Regional Studies, Regional Science, 4(1), 49–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681376.2017.1307784
Online Articles: The Digital Trail
Citing an online journal article follows a very similar pattern. The capitalization rules for the article and journal titles remain the same. The key difference is how you handle the location. If a DOI is available, always use that. It's a persistent link that won't break if the website changes. If there's no DOI, you can use the journal's homepage URL, but remember, APA generally doesn't require retrieval dates for online sources anymore.
Here’s an example for an online article:
Author Surname, F. M. (Publication Year). Article title: Subtitle. Journal Title, Volume(issue), page range if available. DOI or URL
Imagine you found an article by Duvinage in 2013:
Duvinage, M. (2013). Performance of the Emotiv Epoc headset for P300-based applications. BioMedical Engineering Online, 12, Article 56. https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-925X-12-56
When Authors Multiply
What happens when you have more than one author? APA has a system for that too.
- Two Authors: You list both names. In the text, you'd write "Author1 and Author2 (Year)" for a narrative citation or "(Author1 & Author2, Year)" for a parenthetical one. In the reference list, it's "Author1, F. M., & Author2, F. M. (Year). ..."
- Three to Twenty Authors: This is where "et al." comes in handy. In your in-text citations, you'll use the first author's last name followed by "et al." (e.g., "Smith et al. (2020)" or "(Smith et al., 2020)"). However, in the reference list, you still list all the authors, with an ampersand before the last one.
- Twenty-One or More Authors: For sources with a long list of contributors, you simplify both in-text and reference list entries by listing only the first author's surname followed by "et al."
From Database to Reference List
Citing an article found in a database is much like citing any other online journal article. You gather the same core information. The key is to prioritize the DOI if one is provided. If not, the URL of the article within the database might be used, though APA's preference leans towards DOIs or stable URLs.
Remember, the goal is clarity and reproducibility. By following these guidelines, you're not just fulfilling an academic requirement; you're contributing to the ongoing conversation in your field, making it easier for others to build upon your work. It’s a small act of academic courtesy that goes a long way.
