Quick Help: Citing digital sources (APA)

Quick Help: Citing digital sources

Citing digital sources

When citing sources accessed online or from an electronic database, include as many of the following elements as you can find:

  • Author. Give the author’s name, if available.
  • Publication date. Include the date of electronic publication or of the latest update, if available. When no publication date is available, use n.d. (“no date”).
  • Title. If the source is not from a larger work, italicize the title.
  • Print publication information. For articles from online journals, magazines, or reference databases, give the publication title and other publishing information as you would for a print periodical (see models 23–29).
  • Retrieval information. For a work from a database, do the following: if the article has a DOI (digital object identifier), include that number after the publication information; do not include the name of the database. If there is no DOI, write Retrieved from followed by the URL for the journal’s home page (not the database URL). For a work found on a Web site, write Retrieved from and include the URL. If the work seems likely to be updated, include the retrieval date. If the URL is longer than one line, break it only before a punctuation mark; do not break http://.