Cite APA Online Journal Articles
The rules and regulations for citation styles change constantly as educational organizations and accepted practices and standards in the industry change. However, citing APA online journal articles involves adhering to a set of guidelines by the APA, MLA and other associations commonly referred to when writing college papers and other documents.
Instructions
References and Works Cited Lists
1. Gather the pertinent information on the APA online journal article you need to cite. Write down the journal article authors, the title of the article and publishing journal, the date the article was published and the date you retrieved the online journal. You'll also need the name of the database or organization from which you retrieved the APA online journal.
2. Open a word processing software application such as Microsoft Word to help you format the citation for the APA online journal. A hanging, right-indentation of about a half-inch should be set for all lines following the first. This indentation is standard in both APA and MLA citation formats.
3. Start the online journal article by first writing the names of the authors. In both MLA and APA-citation formats, author names should be inverted (author's last name first followed by first and middle names or initials). A citation of an online journal article with two or more authors should start with the first listed author of the article. An example of an APA-style citation is "Doe, J.W." and MLA-style is "Doe, John Wilkes." Note the use of initials with APA style and full names with MLA citation style.
4. Continue writing the second part of the citation by following APA or MLA-specific guidelines. For APA style, write the year of publication enclosed in parenthesis followed by a period; an example would be (2002). The second part of MLA-citation styles says to write the title of the journal article in quotations, being sure to capitalize the major words of the title; place a period at the end of the article title before the ending quotation mark.
5. Write the article title next if using APA guidelines or the journal title if using MLA guidelines. For an APA online journal article being cited in APA style, capitalize only the first word of the article along with proper names following the title with a period. Here is an example of an title cited in APA style: "Talking to pet companions helps depression patients in the United States." If using MLA citation styles for this part, italicize the publishing journal, following it with a period.
6. Continue the next major part of the citation by writing the publishing journal in italics if using APA-citation style, followed by volume/issue and page information. The journal title and volume/issue information are written in italics and are followed by commas; page references end with a period. For MLA citations, this part of the reference includes the volume/issue information formatted with periods followed by the year of publication in parentheses and pagination information if available. If no page references can be found for the online journal article, the reference "n.pag." is used to denote that.
7. Write the final part of the online journal article citation. This information is the date of access and retrieval information and is common to both APA and MLA-citation styles in particular situations. For MLA-style, the date of access is appended at the end of the citation; URL information is not required. For APA-style citations of online journal articles, URL information is not required if the article also appears in print publication; in this case the reference "[Electronic Version]" gets placed after the article title. In APA-citations, DOI (digital object identifier) references are required when available; the DOI appends to the end of the citation like this: "doi:0123456/789012345."
Tags: journal article, online journal, online journal article, article title, publishing journal, volume issue