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The Endicott College Writing Center presents...
APA: How to cite a scholarly journal article from a database
Let's begin by trying to find an article to use in our paper.
From the Endicott College website, find the "Academics" tab, and then the "Diane M. Halle Library" link under "Academic Resources."
From the library webpage, find the "Search Library Databases" link.
Now, the library subscribes to numerous databases that offer a wealth of information for a variety of fields and disciplines.
For our purposes, lets look at the "Sage Premier" database.
Let’s say that I was taking a marketing class and I was interested in how creativity played a role in the teaching of marketing.
For my search terms, I might include something like "Creativity in the Marketing Classroom," and then click "Go."
Now here are my search results. Let's say that I wanted to look at the first article. I'd click the "Full Text PDF" link.
Essentially, what you have here is the article as it originally appeared in print,
but it's been scanned in put into PDF form and then uploaded onto this database.
Consequently, all of the information you’re going to need for your in text citations and your references page
is located right here on this first page, but we'll revisit that in a moment.
Let's say that we wanted to use a direct quote with that article that we found, and we wanted to use the authors’ names in the sentence.
We would include the authors’ names, followed by the year of publication in parentheses,
and then after using the quotation we would include the page number (also in parentheses), and followed by a period.
Let’s say that we wanted to use a direct quote, but not mention the authors’ names in the sentence.
In this case, we would include the authors’ names, the year of publication,
and the page number where the quotation is located, all in parentheses and followed by a period.
If we wanted to paraphrase information from the article and mention the authors’ names in the sentence,
we would again include the authors’ names, followed by the year of publication in parentheses,
and then after paraphrasing information we would include the page number (also in parentheses), and followed by a period.
Now again, that page number points the reader to where you're paraphrasing information from in the source.
Let’s say we wanted to paraphrase, but not mention the authors’ last names in the sentence.
Here we include the authors’ names, the year of publication, and the page number
where we're paraphrasing information from in the source, all in parentheses and followed by a period.
Now, let’s look at what needs to be included on your references page.
First, include the authors’ last names, followed by initials;
the year of publication in parentheses, followed by a period;
the title of the article;
the title of the journal, italicized;
(CORRECTION) the volume and issue number;
the page numbers;
and the DOI number, which essentially is an identifier for the database.
Also, make sure to indent your second and subsequent lines for each individual entry on your references page.
Also, double-check your capitalization and punctuation for each of your entries.
And remember, all of this information is on that first page of the article in the database.
This has been a presentation of Endicott College Writing Center.
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