The guide reflects the 7th edition of the APA referencing system which was released in the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) in October 2019.
For those students who have previously used the 6th edition of APA, the main changes introduced in the 7th edition are as follows:
In text citations
For any citations of three or more authors, only include the first author followed by et al. from the first citation, for example (Meadows et al., 2019). For citations of two authors, always include both authors in the in-text citation, e.g. (Zhang & Hansen, 2017).
In the 6th edition, up to five authors were included in the first in-text citation with et al. only being used for references with six or more authors from the first citation.
Reference list
Publisher location
The publisher location is no longer included in the reference list.
In the 6th edition, both the publisher location (city) and the publisher name were required for books or similar mediums. In the 7th edition, only the publisher’s name is required.
Surnames and initials for up to and including 20 authors should be provided in the reference list.
In APA 7th, when a reference contains 21 or more authors, list the first 19 authors’ names, insert an ellipsis, and then add the final author’s name (see the journal article with 21 or more authors example).
In APA 6th only the first seven authors were listed in the reference list then an ellipsis (three dots) was used before the final author.
Ebooks
For ebooks, the format, platform, or device (e.g. Kindle) is no longer included in the reference, and the publisher is now included (see Ebook example) so it follows the format for a print book.
DOIs
The presentation of Digital object identifiers (DOIs) and URLs has been standardised and both are presented as hyperlinks. DOIs should begin with the prefix https://doi.org/10....
URLs
Website URLs no longer need to be preceded with “Retrieved from” unless there is also a retrieval date (which is required for websites which are continually updated). The website name is included (unless it’s the same as the author), and web page titles are italicised.
The Library has a recorded webinar you can watch on the main changes between the 6th and 7th edition of APA referencing which you can view by clicking on the image below.
