Using APA Referencing Style

Using APA Referencing Style in Dissertation, Thesis and Research Papers

Various research publications use American Psychological Association (APA) Style in many disciplines worldwide for concise, powerful, and persuasive scholarly communication. Referencing is an essential part of academic writing, be it a dissertation by a management student in a B-school, a thesis or a journal paper by a research scholar.

This blog will aid students and research scholars and learn how to include a reference for a dissertation, thesis or scholarly research article.

As a student in, say, a management course or a research scholar, it is imperative to use the correct referencing style. At the end of the thesis or dissertation or research paper, a reference list provides information to identify each work cited in the text.

There are few approaches while working on and selecting a reference list for your thesis or research paper. From the various reference groups (textual works, online media, audiovisual media, data sets), this blog focuses on using references for journal articles using APA 7th edition style.

A reference list entry will generally have the following four elements:

1.       Name of the author(s): Who is responsible for this work?

2.       Date of publication: When was this work published?

3.       Title of publication: What is this work called?

4.   Source or publication details: Where can I retrieve this work?

Authors should use sufficient information for the items and in a specific order to cite an article. I will now discuss, with an example, the various ways and where to find the reference.

a)  In the journal where the article is published

b)  Search using Google scholar

c)   Use a Referencing Software

Note: 

a) The name of the journal is in italics

b) In APA 7th edition style, the DOIs are formatted as URLs

c) Use Referencing Software like Mendeley, Zotero, EndNote or RefWorks to copy the required citation format. I will use a separate blog to list down the steps to cite using reference management software.

You can watch my YouTube link for an introduction to Mendeley Reference Management Software.