Skip to Main Content

Cite Sources

Cite Sources

APA - Articles and Book Chapters

The basic APA format for citing an article is:

Author, Initial. Initial. (Year).

      Title of article. Journal Title,

       volume number(issue

       number), pages. 

       doi:________.

See the Notes in the box below this one.

Example: an article with one author:

Bolger, N. (1990). Coping as a

      personality process: A prospective study. Journal of

      Personality and Social Psychology, 59(3), 525-537.

      doi:10.1037/0022-3514.59.3.525

An article with more than one author:

Duckworth, A. L., Quinn, P. D., & Tsukayama, E.

      (2012). What No Child Left Behind leaves behind: The

      roles of IQ and self-control in predicting standardized

      achievement test scores and report card grades. 

      Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(2), 439-451.

      doi:10.1037/a0026280

An article with more than seven authors (this one was written by nine people):

Javaras, K. N., Schaefer, S. M., van Reekum, C. M., Lapate,

     R. C., Greichar, L. L., Bachhuber, D. R., ... Davidson, 

     R. J.  (2012). Conscientiousness predicts greater

      recovery from negative emotion. Emotion, 12(5),

      875-881. doi:10.1037/a0028105

An article where the database doesn't provide a DOI:

Larsen, J. M. (1975). Effects of increased teacher support

     on young children's learning. Child Development, 46(3),

     631-637.  Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org

(In this example, I'm citing JSTOR rather than the journal's actual homepage because the journal's homepage only includes articles from 1990 onward and this article was published in 1975. If I really wanted to go the extra mile, I could look up the article in CrossRef and find out that it actually does have a DOI assigned.)

To cite a book chapter, follow this basic format:

Author, Initial. Initial. (Year). Title of chapter. In Editors

        of book (Eds.), Book title (pages of chapter).  

         Publisher.

Pastel R. H., Ritchie E. C. (1996). Mitigation of

     psychological effects of weapons of mass

     destruction. In: Ritchie E. L., Watson P. J., 

      Friedman M. J. (Eds.),  Interventions following

      mass violence and disasters: strategies for

      mental health practice (pp. 300-318).  Guilford

       Press.

A few things to note

A few things to note:

  • Title of article should be written out like a sentence - don't capitalize anything except the first word of the title, the first word after a colon, or proper nouns.
  • Words in the journal title do get capitalized.
  • Include up to seven authors. If an article has eight or more authors, list the first six and then use an ellipsis to jump to the last one.
  • Volume and issue number should be listed like this: if you're citing volume 9, issue 6, say 9(6) (without a space between them).
  • DOI may not always be available. If you're reading an article in a database like PsycARTICLES, one may be listed as "Digital Object Identifier." But if you read the article online (e.g. through a database) and no DOI is available, instead provide a URL for the journal homepage (see example below). If you can't find a homepage for the journal, the style recommends that you give the homepage URL for the database where you read it (e.g. http://www.jstor.org).
  • You don't need to cite the date when you accessed the article.