Welcome to the Cecil College Library. This short tutorial will teach users how to create APA citations
for articles found in the databases.
Here is the example that shows what goes into an APA citation for an article. It includes the author’s
last name and first initial, the year of publication, the title of the article with only the first word (and
any proper nouns) capitalized, the title of the journal (in which all words are capitalized as usual)
and the volume number – both of which are in italics, the issue number in parentheses (note that
there is no space between the volume and issue), and the inclusive page numbers. The last item can
be tricky – if there is a doi, that is what goes last, but if there is not you have to locate the homepage
website of the journal’s publisher and use that instead. Also note the “hanging indent” where only
the first line is all the way to the left and all subsequent lines are indented.
Here you can see I’ve already done my search in a database (for more information on database
searching, check out the videos on How to Find Articles in the Databases). I want to create the
citation for this first result. Most of the information I need is right here on the results list.
Here are the authors’ names. Remember we only want their last name and first and middle initials
(if provided). Commas go between each name, and the “and” symbol goes before the last author.
Next we need the year of publication. If any months or seasons are listed as well, ignore those. Put
the year in parentheses with a period after.
Next comes the title of the article. It should be in “sentence case” – that is, only the first word and
any proper nouns should be capitalized. If there is a colon in the title, the first word after the colon
is also capitalized. These rules are true no matter how the title appears in the results list. A period
follows the article title.
The title of the journal, in italics, follows. This time, everything should be capitalized except for
small words like “a” and “the”. Note that here, a comma follows the journal title instead of a
period.
Now we need the volume and issue numbers. Almost always there is a volume number, although
more frequently there is no issue number – if either does not exist, simply skip that part of the
citation. These two pieces of information are the trickiest to put in the citation – notice that the
volume number is in italics, but the issue number is not yet there is no space between them. Only
the issue number goes in parentheses. So we end up with 63 italicized, no space, parenthesis, 4,
close parenthesis, followed by another comma.
The page numbers that encompass the entire article follow the volume and issue information.
Notice that there is no indication that these are pages – i.e. there is no “p.” or “pg.” abbreviation
before the numbers; just list the numbers by themselves. If the pages are not consecutive, use
commas to separate the sections. A period follows the last number.
The last piece of the puzzle is sometimes the trickiest to locate. Remember at the beginning of the
tutorial I mentioned that this last piece of information is the doi, but if there is no doi listed you then
have to include the website homepage of the journal’s publisher. [Highlight doi] Here you can see
the doi is listed after the abstract, so I will add that to my citation. Dois can include both numbers
and letters, but for now they always start with “10.”, so if you’re ever in doubt look for that
beginning. In the citation, always include the lowercase abbreviation “doi” first followed by a colon.
Now let’s pretend that there was no doi listed for this article. To find the publisher’s website in an
EBSCO-run database such as this one it is easy – but if you’re in any other database, a general
Google search for the journal title is the best way to go. Since I’m in an EBSCO database, to find the
journal homepage I simply want to click on the article title, which brings me to all the info about this
article. The journal title will be listed next to “Source”, where we can click on that to get the
information about the journal. Near the bottom you will find the url of the publisher. In your
citation where the doi should be, instead enter “Retrieved from” followed by that url. Note that
there is no colon after the word “from”.
And with that, your citation is complete! Notice that there is no period at the very end – regardless
of whether you end with a url or a doi.Once you’ve completed your entire list of citations, be sure to
alphabetize them by the authors’ last names.
This concludes the tutorial. If you have any questions, please contact the Cecil College Library by
phone at 410-287-1005, send a text message beginning with Cecil to 66746, or send an email to
[email protected]