Appendix D2 APA Formatting of Research Articles

Proper APA formatting is critical in the BSN program and will continue to be critical if you proceed with graduate school. For this course, we are utilizing research articles so this document will serve as a reference sheet for proper in-text citation and full reference citations in APA format.

APA style dictates that authors are named with their last name followed by their initials; publication year goes between parentheses, followed by a period. The title of the article is in sentence-case, meaning only the first word and proper nouns in the title are capitalized. The periodical title is run in title case, and is followed by the volume number which, with the title, is also italicized. If a DOI has been assigned to the article that you are using, you should include this after the page numbers for the article. If no DOI has been assigned and you are accessing the periodical online, use the URL of the website from which you are retrieving the periodical.

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

The above example is exactly how you could reference your article.

Note:

• The last name of author is followed by a comma, then the first letter of their first name followed by a period. If they have a middle name, the first letter of the middle name follows the period and is also followed by a period.
• The publication year is immediately after the authors and is contained in parentheses.
• Only the first word in an article is capitalized, and the first word in a subtitle of an article.
• The journal title it italicized
• The volume number is italicized
• There is no space between the parentheses of the volume number and the issue number.
• The second line is “hanging indent”. This is not needed for our posters but you need to know how to do this for papers.

Let’s look at an example!

From this article, we can find a bunch of information!

Authors: Christine Haedtke, PhD, PCCN, RN; Marianne Smith, PhD, RN; John VanBuren, PhD; Dawn Klein, LMSW; Carolyn Turvey, PhD

Year of publication: 2017

Article title: The Relationships Among Pain, Depression, and Physical Activity in Patients With Heart Failure

Volume number: 32

Issue number: 5

Page numbers: E21-E25

We don’t have a doi number and that’s okay.

So, let’s put that all into a full reference citation:

Haedtke, C., Smith, M., VanBuren, J., Kein, D., Turvey, C. (2017). The relationships among pain, depression, and physical activity in patients with heart failure. Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, 32(5), E21-E25.

In a sentence, you would format an in-text citation one of two ways. Here are the two examples.

In an article by Haedtke et al. (2017) it was found that total time being active was less than one hour per day.

OR

One of the aims of the study was to describe the level of physical activity that patients with heart failure (HF) and depression achieve (Haedtke et al., 2017).

NOTE: In the second example of in-text citation, the period of the sentence comes after the closed parentheses of the citation.

Helpful website links:

General APA formatting: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_style_introduction.html

APA formatting of published articles: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/reference_list_articles_in_periodicals.html