this is Colin Eason with Pima Medical Institute and today we’re going to take a look at how to create an APA reference for a website on screen we have some basic information about the website we need to create a reference form and as often is the case with websites we don’t have the name of an author and in fact we don’t even have a publication date but we do have a copyright date we have the name of the section of the website that we were looking at we have the name of the website itself or the name of the organization’s website and we also have the full web address or URL so let’s put all that together in APA reference format it’s pretty straightforward because we don’t have an author we can’t start the reference with an author’s name right so in this case we start the reference with the section title that we were looking at so in this example it’s how to create an APA paper the easy way please note that we use sentence case in other words we only capitalize words that are proper nouns we do not capitalize the first letter of every single word in that title next in parentheses as with all other APA references we put the publication date or in this case we put the copyright date if we had a full publication date of year month and day we could certainly include that but in this case we’re just going to put the copyright date next in italics this is very important here in italics we put the name of the website that we’re referencing so in this case it’s Pima Medical Institute as with journal and magazine titles we use title case that means that we use a capital letter for the beginning of every significant word of four letters or more so Pima Medical Institute it’s also proper now so therefore we include capital letters whenever referencing web addresses we also have to put retrieved from followed by the web address itself now if that web address runs on to multiple lines three four five lines sometimes we need to include the full thing please do not truncate or cut it short in any way shape or form you do need to include the full web address sometimes your wood processor will automatically change the color of that text into blue and will underline it that’s absolutely fine you can leave it like that or if that bothers you you could highlight the text change the color back to black and remove the underlining if necessary that’s how to create the reference but what about those parentheses all citations that go in the middle of your research paper in the text in this case since there’s no author we can’t put an author and the publication year so we have to put the title of the article please note that we actually put that within quote marks those double quotes and then we put the year of publication after that you cannot provide a page number for a web resource since there are no published page numbers you should never ever include a page number of anything that you’re referencing from a website last but not least occasionally there is no date visible on a website in that case APA has a solution for us wherever there is no date we are allowed to put an D in lower case lower case n period D period literally stands for no date we put that into the reference and as far as the parenthetical citation same thing the title of the website goes into quotes and we put nd at the end for no date as with other APA references if the website section that we’re looking at actually has an author we would of course begin the reference with the author’s name and this section right here the section title would move to here just like with the journal reference it would go right in front of the name of the website itself don’t worry that little bit complicated watch the screencast again look at the magic formula on screen and hopefully that will all make sense for you you
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