College Composition / Unit 26 CMP 0635 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
A Journal Article Reference
The idea
An APA journal article reference gives the author, the date, the article title in plain text, and the journal with its volume, issue, pages and DOI.
In practice
Build it in order. First, the author's last name and initials. Second, the date in parentheses: the year, and for some journals the month or season. Third, the article title, not italicized and not in quotation marks, in sentence case. Fourth, the journal title in italics, with all significant words capitalized, followed by a comma. Fifth, the volume number in italics, followed immediately by the issue number in parentheses, not italicized, and a comma. Sixth, the page range, without p or p p, followed by a period. Seventh, the DOI, written as a full web link beginning with the doi dot org address, or a URL if there is no DOI, with no period after it.
Where people slip
Article titles in APA take no quotation marks, unlike MLA. Carrying MLA's quotation marks into an APA reference is one of the commonest errors students make when switching styles.
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