• 2-minute read
• 18th April 2016

APA Referencing – How to Cite a Journal Article

One of the most important skills in academic writing is referencing sources correctly, and APA referencing is one of the most common citation styles around. It is, therefore, pretty handy to know how to cite a journal article with APA referencing (7th edition), especially since academic journals are some of the most useful sources for university work.

Luckily for you, dear reader, you’re looking at a blog post explaining exactly how to do that.

In-Text Citations

In APA, citing a journal article requires you to provide the author surname and year of publication in parentheses, along with relevant page numbers if quoting directly:

The meaning of an action depends on ‘intentions and thoughts’ (Brodbeck, 1963, p. 309).

This changes when the author is named in the text, since there’s no need to duplicate it in the citation. Instead, simply provide the year of publication immediately after the author name (page numbers still appear after quoted text):

According to Brodbeck (1963), concepts ‘do not themselves refer to anything’ (p. 311).

Multiple Authors

When citing texts with three or more authors, you should just cite the first listed author’s name and ‘et al.’, which means ‘and others’:

Researchers should use specific devices to measure posture (Kozey-Keadle et al., 2011).

However, you should provide all author names in the reference list.

Reference Lists

APA referencing requires all cited sources to be included in a reference list at the end of your document (with texts listed alphabetically by author surname). The information needed for a journal article is:

Author Surname, Initial(s). (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, Volume (Issue), page range.

Note that APA uses a ‘sentence case’ format in reference lists, so titles require capitalisation for the first word and proper nouns, but should be lower case throughout otherwise.

As such, the Brodbeck article cited above would appear as:

Brodbeck, M. (1963). Meaning and action. Philosophy of Science, 30 (4), pp. 309-324.

If you’re citing an online article, give a DOI or URL in the reference list, too:

Kozey-Keadle, S., Libertine, A., Staudenmayer, J., & Freedson, P. (2011). The feasibility of reducing and measuring sedentary time among overweight, non-exercising office workers. Journal of Obesity, 2012 (12), pp. 1-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/282303