The Lighthouse

How do you reference an online journal article? The answer is more tangled than you might expect.

Here’s the situation: you’ve found a journal article through the library’s online databases (e.g. EBSCO or JSTOR). Your lecturer has provided a journal article on Stream or in the course’s study materials. You want to add it to your reference list. But how?

This is the standard APA format for a print journal:

That has all the important info, but what about the online information? The URL? The name of the database? The answer is so complicated, there’s a flowchart to explain it on the official APA blog:

• A DOI and URL flowchart

In the 6th edition of APA, there’s a hierarchy of referencing information for online sources. Start at the top of the list; if you cannot find that element, move down to the next one.

1. If there’s a DOI, use that
2. If there’s no DOI, and the article is publically available, use the article URL
3. If it’s not publically available, use the journal / publisher homepage URL
4. If there’s no homepage URL, use the database’s homepage URL

1. DOI

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a set of numbers that uniquely identifies a source. It’s a little like a barcode or ISBN. Many journal articles use DOIs now – they’ll be written on the front page or the header / footer of each page. You can also look them up on this website:

• Crossref.org

If your source has a DOI, that’s all you need to include:

If there’s no DOI, you’ll need to include a URL.

2. Open web URL

Is it available online to anyone, without needing a password? If it is, then you can just include the direct address:

Most journal articles aren’t available to everyone online (yet!). Instead, these articles are in databases, which restrict access to paying customers. If you’re a Massey University student, the library funds access to these databases, but you still shouldn’t use a non-public URL.

3. Journal homepage URL

APA avoids naming databases in references. This is because databases regularly change journal coverage, so the same article may not be available in that database tomorrow. Some articles are available in several different databases! Likewise, you shouldn’t use URLs from Stream: only Massey University students can log in there, so it still has restricted access.

Instead, APA wants you to find the public homepage of the journal. This is what it says in the manual:

If no DOI has been assigned to the content, provide the home page URL of the journal or of the book or report publisher. If you are accessing the article from a private database, you may need to do a quick web search to locate this URL.
(APA, 2010, pp. 191-192)

The format is the same as an open web URL:

But what do you do if there’s no public homepage? Perhaps the publisher has gone out of business. Perhaps the material is only available through a database. In that case…

4. Database information

If all else fails, you can fall back on the database information. Provide either the front page URL of the database, or the name of the database and any numerical information for the source:

This should only be done as a last resort.

More information

For more information, check out the official guide to APA style:

• American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. Washington, DC: Author.

Or OWLL’s APA guide:

• APA style