Finding complete APA references

I often have students asking me how to find the correct reference for journal articles. This is happening more frequently now with the shift to APA 7th edition.

I use two tools to find my references: GoogleScholar, and Cross-Ref.

I start by pasting the journal article title into GoogleScholar, and searching. If the primary entry doesn't return a reference with all the components - all author names, the date, the title, the volume, the issue, and the page range - I will often check all the versions, and sometimes I may make a composite entry from a number of versions listed.

Then, once I am happy that I have a relatively complete article reference, I paste my reference into Cross-Ref (here) to get the DOI (read more on DOIs here).

Then I use the DOI to double-check the reference I have compiled from GoogleScholar. If you would prefer to watch a rough video on how to do this, check out below:



I hope this is useful :-)


Sam

• Reference: Tavakol, M., & Dennick, R. (2011). Making sense of Cronbach’s alpha. International Journal of Medical Education, 2, 53-55. https://doi.org/10.5116/ijme.4dfb.8dfd