APA Referencing Style Updated to 7th Edition!

Please note: This guide has been modified to reflect updates to the APA referencing style published in the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020). Only continuing students who have already commenced theses or other major works should continue to use APA 6th edition.

There are both significant and minor changes in the new edition.

Significant changes:

• Multiple authors – in text citations for three or more authors should include the name of the first author only, followed by et al. Reference list entries for works by up to and including 20 authors should include all authors names. For works by more than 20 authors, include the names of the first 19 authors followed by an ellipsis (…) and then the final author’s name.
• Place of publication is no longer included in references.
• Include the issue number in parentheses immediately after the volume number, for all journals that have an issue number.
• DOIs are now given in the following format: https://doi.org/xxxxx
• It is not necessary to include the words “Retrieved from” before a URL.
• Database names and URLs for items in academic research databases should not be included in references, except for databases such as Cochrane, ERIC and Factiva that include works of limited circulation – for these items include the name of the database and the URL for the specific work.
• For electronic works that do not have a DOI or a directly linking URL, the reference should be the same as the reference for a printed version of the work.

About APA Style

There are two parts to referencing: the citations within the text of your paper and the reference list at the end of your paper.

The APA referencing style is an “author-date” style, so the citation in the text consists of the author(s) and the year of publication given wholly or partly in round brackets.

Use only the surname of the author(s) followed by a comma and the year of publication. Include page, chapter or section numbers if you need to be specific, for example if you are quoting, paraphrasing or summarising:

No distinction is made between books, journal articles, internet documents or other formats except for electronic documents that do not provide page numbers. In this case use the paragraph number, if available, with the abbreviation para.

The full details of the source are given in a reference list at the end of the document:

Reference list entries contain all the information that is required to follow up your source. Reference lists in APA are arranged alphabetically by author.

See Reference List Entries or All Examples for details on how to construct references for specific resources such as books, journals and web pages.

Please remember to check with your unit co-ordinator or tutor before submitting your assignments, as their style preference may vary from the guidelines presented here.

When using EndNote referencing software, to use the APA 7th style, please either upgrade your EndNote software to EndNote version X9.3 or if you do not wish to upgrade to version X9.3, download and use the following output style – APA 7th. For information about EndNote, please see the EndNote Guide.