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Wednesday 7 July 2021

APA reference for no author journal article

I encountered a very interesting journal reference recently. The proposed reference for the article was:

Emerald Publishing Limited (2019). Inequality in equality. Development and Learning in Organizations, 34(1), 25- 27. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/DLO-10-2019-0241/full/html

Hmm, I thought. That doesn't look right. The publisher can't be the author, and the URL is not a DOI. I went digging, and found that the article was a summary of an article written by two authors, with no author noted. So there was no author.

Blithely I 'assumed' - crikey, isn't that fatal! - that I would simply fill in the space for the author with "The Editors". I figured that it must have been the editors who had written the summary. So I assumed that the reference for the article would be:

The Editors (2019). Inequality in equality: Neoliberal systems in the workplace. Development and Learning in Organizations, 34(1), 25-27. https://doi.org/10.1108/DLO-10-2019-0241

However, I was worried enough to email APAStyle and ask them. They speedily replied with the following advice:

"When an individual author is not available and a group author is not obvious, move the title of the work to the author position of the reference" (Lazer, S., personal communication, 17 March 2021). So the in-text citation would read:

("Inequality in Equality," 2019) or "Inequality in Equality" (2019)

...and we would reference the article as (Lazer, S., personal communication, 17 March 2021):

Inequality in equality: Neoliberal systems in the workplace. (2019). Development and Learning in Organizations, 34(1), 25–27. https://doi.org/10.1108/DLO-10-2019-0241

I suppose this fits with newspaper articles which appear authorless. It is logical, and it is always a good idea to check!


Sam

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