APA Guides
Recommended sources for help with APA style guidelines:
- APAstyle.orgFree online help directly from the American Psychological Association. Scroll down to "Quick Answers" section for help with references and formatting.
- Purdue OWL APA Formatting & Style GuideFree APA help online from Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL). Provides examples and instructions for commonly cited materials, as well as a sample APA paper and tips for avoiding plagiarism. The left-hand menu has guidance for both in-text citations and the references list at the end of your paper.
Automatically Creating Citations in Library Article Collections
Many databases and article collections, plus many e-books, will automatically create citations for whichever article or chapter you are viewing.
Look for a “Cite,” “CiteNow,” or “Cite This Item” button on the database record for the specific article or chapter.
(Not all databases have this feature. For example, LexisNexis does not.)
Examples of citation buttons:
EBSCOhost databases ProQuest databases JSTOR
(e.g., Academic Search Premier) (e.g, Newsstand)
Online Citation Creators
There are plenty of citation creators online, but you always need to double-check their accuracy. Never copy and paste without reviewing the citation for accuracy yourself!
DOI
APA style requires that a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) be included in your citation, if available. To see if a journal article has been assigned a DOI, you can look it up on CrossRef or Ask a Librarian.
For more information about the DOI system, see http://www.doi.org.
