Infographic: APA Style cheat sheet: How to cite a journal article using APA Style

Struggling to format your references using APA style? Then this interactive cheat sheet is just the thing for you! 

A reference list is a crucial part of your research paper; it provides readers with the information they would need to find and retrieve every source that you have cited. Every source cited across your paper should be listed in your references. Conversely, every source that appears within your reference list must also appear across your paper as an in-text citation. This ensures that you appropriately attribute ideas or work that is not your own, to their original authors.

Several existing formatting and style guides provide specific guidelines for citing different types of sources. Depending upon a paper’s area of study, journals insist that authors follow the recommended style guide for citing and formatting their references. For instance, an author writing a medical paper would be expected to follow the AMA (American Medical Association) style.

Of the formatting and style guides used by journal articles within the social sciences, the APA (American Psychological Association) style manual is used most commonly. It provides guidelines and examples for the general formatting of a research paper, in-text citations, and a reference list. It also indicates how to cite different types of sources such as articles appearing in scholarly journals or other periodicals, books, and electronic sources, amongst others.

According to APA style, you need to do the following:

• Add your reference list at the end of your paper, starting on a new page, separate from the rest of your paper.
• The title of this page – References – must be centered at the top of the page and should appear in 12 pt. Times New Roman font.
• The title should NOT be bold, underlined, or have any quotation marks either before or after it.
• All of the text within your reference list should be double-spaced like the rest of your paper.

The interactive infographic above gives you a step-by-step breakdown of how to cite a journal article using APA style. It systematically covers which details of retrieved journal articles you must include in a listed reference. It also indicates the sequence in which these details must appear. In addition to the guidelines covered within the infographic, here are a couple of additional tips for citing journal articles using APA style:

• Do not use any abbreviations while citing the title of a journal. Ensure that you present the complete journal title, maintaining relevant punctuation and capitalization that the journal itself uses in its title.
  For example: ReCALL not RECALL or Knowledge Management Research & Practice not Knowledge Management Research and Practice (Purdue OWL: APA Formatting and Style Guide).
• All journal titles must appear in title case i.e. all major words must be capitalized, excluding articles, prepositions and conjunctions.
  For example: The Amercian Journal of Psychiartry not The American Journal Of Psychiatry.

Feel free to download a PDF version of this infographic and print it out as handy reference. And stay tuned for a SlideShare on how to cite other sources in the APA style!

You might also be interested in reading:

• Handling abbreviations of journal names in references
• How should I cite a reference that I found in a paper?
• What should be included as references in my paper?
• What is the standard number of references a paper should have?

References:

• Purdue OWL: APA Formatting and Style Guide