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Citing Your Sources

APA Citations Online SkillShop

American Psychological Association Style

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The American Psychological Association (APA) has established a style that it uses in all of the books and journals that it publishes. Many others working in the social and behavioral sciences have adopted this style as their standard as well.

APA's style rules and guidelines are set out in their publication manual:

Citation styles change over time. Be sure to only use the most recent resources that reflect the current edition. The current edition for APA is the 7th.

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Online Resources from APAStyle.org

APA Style Blog
If the manual does not answer your questions consider using the blog's Contact Us page. You can even follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

About APA Style

Watch the Tutorials and Webinars on APA Style .

APA Formatting and Style Guide
From APA Style Blog

Citing Online Sources in APA

Citing Online sources: 

Citing Websites:

Common APA Errors

Below is a reminder of some common formatting details that sometimes are overlooked.

  • Reference list:
    • Line Spacing: double-space the reference list.
    • Hanging indent: indent all but the first line of each entry (the opposite of how you indent a paragraph).
    • Italicization: book titles, journal titles and volume number are italicized; do not italicize article titles.
    • DOI: for electronic materials, if you have a doi#, you do not need to include the URL.
    • You do not need to include which database you found the article in (this is sometimes included if you use an auto-generated citation from a database--you should always double check auto-generated citations for accuracy). 
  • Capitalization: for book or article titles, only capitalize the first word of the title and subtitle. Also capitalize proper nouns.