APA 7
APA 7th Edition is the most commonly used referencing style here at the University of Portsmouth. Below you will find general guidance on how to reference and cite using APA 7th Edition, as well as examples for the specific sources you are likely to use in your assignments.
Your department or lecturer may prefer you to reference sources differently from the guidance given here. Always follow the requirements of your department or lecturer.
External visitors are welcome to use this guide, but note that your institution's requirements may differ from those suggested here.
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Reference
If there is no named author (either individual or corporate), you should move the title of your source to the start of your reference (where the author would usually be).
For example, for a webpage your reference would be:
Title. (Year). Website name. https://doi.org or URL
For an online news article, your reference would be:
Title of article. (Year, Month Date of publication). Title of newspaper. https://doi.org/or URL
When arranging these sources in your reference list, ignore the three non-significant words 'a', 'an' and 'the' if they appear at the beginning of the title for the purposes of alphabetising. You should still include them in the reference (and citation) but ignore them when sorting your list into alphabetical order.
If the title starts with a number, you should treat this as if it was spelled out for the purposes of order, but retain the original spelling in the reference. For example, '20' would be treated as if it said 'twenty'.
If the author is designated as "Anonymous", cite the word Anonymous in your text as the author. It should also be used as the author in your reference list.
(Anonymous, 1993, p. 116).
Do not use "Anonymous" as an author unless it is designated in the work: works without authors are generally identified by their titles.
In-text Citation
When a source has no author, your citation should be the first two or three words of the title followed by the year.
If the title of the source is italicised in the reference, because it is a book for example, it should also be italicised in the citation. For example:
... in the recent book (Encyclopedia of psychology, 1991, p. 62) ...
If the title of the source is not italicised in the reference, because it is an article or webpage for example, it should be placed in double quotation marks in the citation:
... in this article ("Individual differences", 1993, p. 12) ...