When writing research articles, you may want to use news articles from the internet as a source. If you use the American Psychological Association (APA) citation method, you will need to include the in-text citation and an entry in the reference list at the end of the article. In general, these entries should contain enough information for readers to find the news article you used when writing. For online news articles, you will need to include the URL of the article in the reference list entry.
Step
Method 1 of 2: Formatting Reference List Entries
Step 1. Begin the entry with the author's last name
The name of the author of an online news article is usually shown below the header, although sometimes the name appears at the end of the article. Format name information by typing the author's last name first, insert a comma, and enter the initials of the author's first name. Add the initials of the middle name if applicable.
- For example: Albert, A.
- If there are multiple authors, separate each name with a comma and add an “and” (“&”) symbol before the last author’s name.
- If the author's name is not available, skip this element and begin the entry with the title of the news article.
Step 2. State the date of publication or last update of the article
Look for the date of publication above the article, below the title. Type the date in parentheses and start with the year. Insert a comma after the year, then state the month and date of publication of the article (if available). Do not shorten the name of the month. Place a period after the closing parenthesis.
- For example: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20).
- For Indonesian: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20).
Step 3. Type the title and subtitle of the article in sentence case format (capital letters as the first letter in the first word and name)
If there is a subtitle, add a colon after the title and type the subtitle using the same capitalization format. Insert a period at the end of the title.
- For example: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20). The good-enough life: The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential.
- For Indonesian: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20). The good-enough life: The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential.
Step 4. Enter the name of the newspaper or news portal website
After the title, type the name of the newspaper or website that contains the news article in italics. Use the title case format when typing names (capitalize the first letter of the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs). Insert a period at the end of the title.
- For example: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20). The good-enough life: The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential. The New York Times.
- For Indonesian: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20). The good-enough life: The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential. The New York Times.
Step 5. End the entry with the URL of the article
After the name of the newspaper or news portal website, type the phrase " Retrieved from ", followed by the URL of the article. The APA citation style recommends using the main page of a website or newspaper as much as possible to avoid adding dead URLs. Do not insert a period at the end of the URL.
- For example: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20). The good-enough life: The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential. The New York Times. Retrieved from
- For Indonesian: Alpert, A. (2019, February 20). The good-enough life: The desire for greatness can be an obstacle to our own potential. The New York Times. Taken from
Reference List Entry Format:
Author's last name, N. N. (Year, Month Date). Article title in sentence case format: Article subtitle in sentence case format. Name of Newspaper or News Portal Website in Title Case Format. Retrieved from URL
Method 2 of 2: Creating In-Text Quotes
Step 1. Include the author's name and year of publication when paraphrasing the information
In general, you need to add an in-text citation (bracketed citation) at the end of the sentence that is a paraphrase of the information in the source news article. Format the citation by typing the author's last name, inserting a comma, and adding the year the article was published. Place the in-text quote (bracketed quotation) before the closing punctuation mark.
- For example, you could write it down as follows: The idea that striving for greatness might not be the best goal for humanity runs through hundreds of years of philosophy (Alpert, 2019).
- For Indonesian: The desire to achieve glory is not the best goal because humanity has walked in philosophy for hundreds of years.
Tip:
The APA citation style requires an in-text citation at the end of each sentence that contains the information you are paraphrasing. The only exception is block quotes from several sentences from the same source. For block quotes like this, the in-text quote is added at the end of the quote.
Step 2. Use the first few words of the title if the article has no author
If no author's name is mentioned in the article, include the first few words of the title as a citation element in the text, and enclose those words in quotation marks. Type in a word in the title case format. Insert a comma before the closing quotation mark, then enter the year the article was published.
For example, let's say one of the sources you use is an article from The Globe and Mail entitled "How Globe and Mail reporters traced the rise of fentanyl". This article does not display the author's name, and only mentions the word " staff ". If you were to paraphrase or quote information from this article in writing, your in-text citation would look something like this: ("How Globe and Mail," 2018)
Step 3. Include page or paragraph numbers for direct quotes
If you want to quote in-text for a direct quote, direct the reader to the part of the text that contains the direct information. For online news articles that don't have page numbers, count the paragraph numbers. Type a comma after the year of publication, then enter the abbreviation “para.”, followed by the paragraph number.
- For example, you might write: A "good-enough" relationship with nature entails that "we recognize both the abundance and the limitations of the planet we share with infinite other life forms" (Alpert, 2019, para. 7).
- For English: To have a “good enough” relationship with nature, we need to “recognize both the abundance and the limits on the planet we share with millions of other living things” (Alpert, 2019, para. 7).
Step 4. Ignore other aspects of the information already mentioned in the text
If you mention the author's name in the article, you do not need to include it again in the in-text citation. Instead, place the year of publication (in parentheses) after the author's name. If you include both the author's name and the year of publication in your article, you don't need any in-text citations for paraphrased information.
- If the author's name is mentioned in the article and you are citing information directly, include the citation in the text after the citation, with the page or paragraph number containing the source information.
- For articles that don't have the author's name, you don't need full-text citations if you mention the title of the article in the article. As with the author's name, you can simply add the year the article was published (in parentheses), right after the article title.
