Smallbone Library: Citing and Referencing (APA): Journals and periodicals (including online)

In this section:

IIB students must make sure they refer to the "Documentation Checklist" (p.14) and "Elements to be Included in a Reference" (p.16-17) in Effective Citing and Referencing (IBO, 2020) throughout the writing process, and when proofreading their work. This supersedes any requirements of APA (but any major differences will be clearly noted in this LibGuide).

Notes for IB students:

The IB Guide Effective Citing and Referencing says "When consulted sources are accessed online, the IB prefers the use of URLs (uniform resource locators) or DOIs (digital object identifiers), even if the published style guide makes them optional." (2020, p.11), meaning that if you can give a URL (or DOI) for your source, you should. This does raise the question "how would they know?" but, for example, if you discuss searching databases in your methodology but all your references are to print resources, it does look a bit suspicious...

However because journal articles are stable sources, you should not include the date accessed for this type of source, even if you include a URL (and the IBO says you should not - see the table on p.16-17 of Effective Citing and Referencing (2020)).

Journals

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyy

De Bruijne, M., & Wijnant, A. (2014). Improving response rates and questionnaire design for mobile web surveys. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 78(4), 951-962. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/24545977

Now fill in the extra fields - Volume and Issue number (some journals may only have a Volume if they are published annually), and Pages. If you found the article online then the IBO recommend you put where you found it. This could be the URL (choose the stable URL if given - JSTOR lists this, for example) or the DOI in the format https://doi.org/xxxxx, where xxxxx represents the DOI.

Newspapers and magazines

Newspaper articles accessed via a subscription database should be referenced in exactly the same way as print sources (see below). [For IB students: Despite the IBO advice to include URLs where possible, the table on pages 16-17 of Effective Citing and Referencing (2020) does not mention newspapers accessed via database, which leaves the advice about whether to include a date accessed unclear, so it is better to avoid issues with different examiners taking different positions by referencing them as print sources.]

Newspaper articles accessed via the paper's website should be referenced as webpages. These are not necessarily stable sources (they are sometimes edited) so will need a date accessed.

Author, A. A., Author, B. B. & Author, C. C. (Year, Month Date of Publication). Article title. Newspaper Title, xx-xx.

Myers, R. (2017, June 4). School library cuts 'hurt pupil creativity'. Sunday Times, 9.

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Advanced note for journals and periodicals

Fascinating fact! There is a minor technicality in APA 6th edition that inserts page numbers slightly differently in references for newspapers than for journals and magazines (if you actually care what this is, look here!). Given no-one expects you to be a referencing expert (and the IBO, for example, gives you a free choice of citation styles) we recommend you keep things simple and use the "Article in a journal" setting for all of these (and never use "Article in a periodical" setting). This will keep your reference list looking consistent and save you trying to decide whether you think a publication is a journal or a periodical.