Answered By: Dean Riley
Last Updated: Jun 15, 2016     Views: 65

First, check to see if a DOI has been added recently to published material. DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) are used to identify digital materials uniquely and persistently. APA is now recommending that these numbers, when available, be included in citations to electronically retrieved articles. Some articles have them and others do not. If they do, you follow the Example #1 in Section 7.01 of the APA Manual (p. 198), which is mostly the citation plus the DOI. 

If you cannot find a DOI, then look APA Section 7.01, example #3 shows an article with no DOI. This will use the "Retrieved from." NOTE: Be aware that if there is no DOI, you technically need to list the publisher's URL of the journal and its home page, not the Permalink URL to a journal article in a database. On page 198, the second item in the bulleted list states, "If no DOI is assigned to the content and you retrieved it online, include the home page URL for the journal, newsletter, or magazine in the reference. Use this format: Retrieved from http://www.xxxxxxx."