Skip to Main Content

SOWK 2013 Introduction to Social Work: APA Citations

Citation and Writing Assistance

Do you need help with citations or formatting?  The Citation Station is a resource area on the 1st floor of the John Vaughan Library, near the atrium, which has life-sized samples of MLA and APA papers, official style manuals, English Composition I and II textbooks, as well as a variety of other citation guides to help you.

Library tutor area

APA Style Guide

Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). (2020). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

The library owns several copies of the style guide (see below). In the Broken Arrow campus library there are two copies of the 7th edition in reference (one copy in Ready Ref. BF76.7 .P83 2020 and a copy in regular reference); additionally there is also a copy on permanent reserve.

The American Psychological Association originally created a publication manual to provide a common structure for all journal manuscripts in the area of the social sciences.

Many other disciplines (including psychology, the behavioral sciences, nursing, personnel administration and many areas within education) have adopted this as their professional writing standard as well.

In an academic environment, you will often be expected to conform to this standard when writing. At this point, you should be mostly concerned with creating an accurate reference list using proper format and providing citations within the text to give credit for an idea or concept to the source from which you got it.

Important Note: There is a new citation format for articles found online (APA Style Guide to Electronic References, 2007). The biggest change is including the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) at the end of the citation instead of: Retrieved on date from name of database.   A link to this resource is below.

If there is no DOI listed (look on the item record and the first & last page of the article), replace that with Retrieved from name of database.