DNP Writing: APA Style

Test out your APA skills with the APA Practice Worksheet and then check your answers. Questions? Ask a librarian!

This quick guide illustrates how to create and format basic reference entries for books and journal articles. It is excerpted from the APA Format (7th Edition) Guide from Millikin University's Writing Center. For more detailed information, see the full Writing Center guide (linked on the left), or the full manual (on reserve in the library).

A note about titles: APA style uses something called "sentence case" for source titles. This means that when writing up your reference list entries, only certain words in their titles are capitalized, including the first word of the title, the first word of a subtitle (after a colon), and proper nouns.

Journal article, one to two authors:

Johnson, M. K. (2013). Investigating the relationship of nutrition- and exercise-compromising health

impairments with Autism Spectrum Disorders among children with special health care needs.

American Journal of Health Education, 44(4), 221-8.

Journal article, three to 20 authors:

Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions into storybooks: A

comparison of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States.

Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8(3), 207-217.

*to cite parenthetically: (Grady et al., 2019)

*to cite in narrative: Grady et al. (2019) . . .

Book:

LeFever Kee, J., Hayes, E. R., & McCuistion, L. E. (2015). Pharmacology: A patient-centered nursing

process approach. Elsevier/Saunders.

(note, in APA 7th edition, place of publication is no longer included in book citations)

Chapter in a Book:

LeFever Kee, J., Hayes, E. R., & McCuistion, L. E. (2015). A nurses' perspective

of pharmacology. In J. Jones (Ed.) Pharmacology: A patient-centered nursing

process approach (pp. 105-133). Elsevier/Saunders.

DOI= Digital Object Identifier

DOI (you may see the term in lower case as well: doi) help provide a stable location for digital objects online. They are becoming increasingly important in various citation styles, including APA style. Try Googling a DOI sometime…you should be taken to a unique website with the article’s information.

DOI and APA Style (From the MU Writing Center APA Style 7th edition guide)

DOI and URL

Content on the Internet tends to be moved, restructured, or deleted, which results in broken hyperlinks and nonworking URLs. Thus, scholarly publishers have begun assigning a digital object identifier or DOI to articles and other documents in order to maintain retrievability. All DOI numbers begin with a 10 and contain a (4 number) prefix plus a suffix separated by a slash.

Example:         DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.27.3.379

*A DOI may be found in scholarly journal articles, but it may appear with other kinds of sources as well. Always use the DOI if it is listed.

*If an online work has both a DOI and a URL, include only the DOI.

*In your reference list, always use the current, preferred format for a DOI, even though the article presents a DOI in an older format.

Example of current, preferred format:      https://doi.org/10.1037/a0040251

Examples of DOIs in citations (excerpted from the APA Style 7th edition guide from the Millikin University Writing Center):

Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions into storybooks: A

comparison of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States.

Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8(3), 207-217. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185

American Psychological Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental

disorders (5th ed.).https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

How do I find a DOI?

-Not all articles will be assigned a DOI (though they are becoming increasingly standard), but if an article has one, you may find it in all sorts of places!

1. The DOI may be listed in the database citation information about the article:

2. It is also common to find the DOI on the title page of the article in all sorts of locations:

a)  Here is an example where it was found in the lower left corner of the title page-

b)  On this one, it was found on the lower right corner of the title page (notice it is also not labeled “DOI”, it just has the number by itself!)-

c)  On this journal article, the DOI was found on the left side of the page, sort of in the middle-

d)  And on this example, it was in the middle of the page, before the text of the article begins-

DOIs CAN BE FOUND IN MANY PLACES! Look in the most common places…

If you don’t see a DOI, use the APA rule to cite an electronic source without a DOI. Excerpted from the APA Style 7th edition guide from the Millikin Writing Center:

For works without DOIs that are from most university/academic research databases, do not include a URL- these works are widely available. Examples of such databases include Academic Search Complete, CINAHL Complete, PsycInfo, PubMed, Proquest, etc.

For works from websites that don't have DOIs (excluding the above), include a URL in the "Reference" citation.

Do not use "Retrieved from" (simply include the URL without that statement) before the URL unless the website being cited is unstable or changes over time (e.g., dictionary titles or websites that update frequently, etc.).

Examples:

Stein, M. B., & Taylor, C. T. (2019). Approach to treating social anxiety disorder in adults.

UpToDate. Retrieved September 13, 2019,

from https://www.uptodate.com/contents/approach-to-treating-social-anxiety-disorder-in-adults

Zalta, E. N. (2019). The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2019 ed.). Stanford University.

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019