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Business and Economics Librarian

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Jason Hall
He/Him/His
Contact:
Lemieux Library
Seattle University

2nd Floor Research Services
(206) 398-4484
Subjects: Business

APA online sources

The following list of online sources are excellent choices for getting help with citations. The Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) site will meet the needs of just about any APA in-text, reference list, or formatting question you have. 

APA citing in databases

 look for this icon in the Ebscohost Databases. Other databases may also provide citing tools. Be careful! Sometimes the format from the database does not match the required style.

APA. American Psychological Association

APA Basic Citation Anatomy

APA citation style is used in nursing, social sciences, education, psychology.

A citation style which uses parentheses in text (author-date) instead of footnotes or endnotes, this format is popular in those disciplines where the date of the work, its currency, is significant to the reading of the text. Sources are listed at the end of the text in a section called References.

Reference List
Includes only those works which were cited in the text. Alphabetical listing. Author’s name is abbreviated, initials are given instead of the first name. The date follows. Source information in included in the citation, as well as the page numbers. For an internet source, add the retrieval date and the URL.

Reference List examples:

Books
Kidner, J. (1972). The Kidner report: A statistical look at bureaucracy at the
            paper clip and stapler level. Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Books

Articles from a print journal
Heydt-Stevenson, J. (2000). "Slipping into the ha-ha”: Bawdy humor and body
            politics in Jane Austen’s novels. Nineteenth-Century Literature, 55 (3), 309-340.

Journal article from a library database with a DOI
Heydt-Stevenson, J.(2000). "Slipping into the ha-ha:" Bawdy humor and body politics in

         Jane Austen's novels. Nineteenth Century Literature 55(3),314.
         doi:10.1525/incl.2000.55.3.01pol464 l.2000.55

Journal article from a library database with no DOI
Banoff, S. I. (1994, June). Turkeys and chickens fear IRS audits. Journal of
         Taxation
, p.380.Retrieved  from Proquest Research Library database. 

Internet source - APA requires a URL at the end of Internet citations
Avery, S., & Masciadrelli, J. (2003, April) Peep research: A study of small fluffy
            creatures and library usage. April 2003. 

            Retrieved from http://www.millikin.edu/staley/fluff/peep_research.html

 

A note on DOIs (Digital Object Identifier)
A Digital Object Identifier is a unique code assigned to articles and other documents. APA requires the use of DOIs in citations, if the article has been assigned one. Some databases will have the DOI in the article record, some pdf's may also have the DOI. Go also to the journal website; you may find the DOI for the article there. If your searching results in no DOI, then include at end of the Article citation Retrieved from [source] database (name of database).

Citing Electronic Resources

 

You will see digital object intentifiers (DOI) to many of the more recent articles by scholarly publishers.   When a DOI is available, include it instead of the URL. Since the internet is a "moving target," that is, content is often moved or changed, the DOI was created to solve the problem of broken and nonworking links. The DOI is a unique alphanumeric string which identifies an article and is used by scholarly publishers to provide a persistent link to its web location

  • You no longer have to include the database name.  You can include if you think the material would be hard to find. However, do not add the database URL.
  • You no longer need to add a retrieval  date to journal articles or books. But do add to sources where the content might change or be updated, e blogs or wikis.   If the date of a website is not given, use (n.d.). 

Example of Article With DOI:

Dobbin, F., & Kelly, E. (2007). How to stop harassment:  professional construction of legal compliance in organizations.  American Journal of Sociology, 112(4), 1203-1243. doi: 10.1086/508788

Example of an Article without DOI:

(Consult your instructor) 

APA 6th ed rule if there is no DOI, and the journal has a home page use that URL. This example shows the citation from journal web page and from database.

Tandberg, D. (2010). The Politics of state funding of public higher education. Educational Policy, 24(5), 735-778. Retrieved from http://epx.sagepub.com/

Tandberg, D. (2010). The Politics of state funding of public higher education. Educational Policy, 24(5), 735-778. Retrieved from Education Research Complete database.   (Note: APA states that including the database information is not necessary, but OWL at Purdue still includes it for users)