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Guidelines for Citations & References

The HKS Misinformation Review uses the APA7 reference style (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition). Please review our guidelines and examples below to ensure that your manuscript conforms to the specified reference style. A list of examples for formatting different kinds of publications in APA 7 can also be found in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and at the Purdue Online Writing Lab.

In-text citations 

If the author is already mentioned in a sentence, the year should follow the name within parentheses.

  • Both Jones (2013) and Brown (2010) showed that …

If the author’s name is not already mentioned in the same sentence or paragraph, the last name and year should be inserted in parentheses after the relevant text. A string of citations is to be listed alphabetically, separated by semicolons.

  • The statistics clearly show this to be untrue (Brown 2010; Jones 2013).

If there are two authors for a source, use an ampersand. 

  • (Jones & Brown, 2008) 

If there are three or more authors for a source, use only the first author with “et al.”

  • (Jones et al., 2008)

If multiple works by the same author and published in the same year are cited, add a lowercase letter after the year. Add the letters in alphabetical order starting with an “a.” 

  • (Jones, 2013a; Jones, 2013b)

If specific pages are cited, the page numbers should follow the year.

  • (Brown, 2004, p. 65; Jones, 2013, pp. 143–145)

For publications authored and published by organizations, the name of the organization can sometimes be abbreviated—for example, “American Psychological Association” can be abbreviated to “APA.” You are not obligated to abbreviate the name of an organization, but you can if the abbreviation is well-known, will help avoid cumbersome repetition, or will appear at least three times in the paper. 

*Note: Do not include URLs in citations; please include them in the Bibliography instead. 

Bibliography

Only sources referenced in the text should be listed in the Bibliography and vice versa. 

DOIs (as URLs) should be included for all bibliographic entries for all works that have one. 

All cited sources in the manuscript must be listed in full in alphabetical order of the authors’ last names in the Bibliography at the end of the main text. 

If there is a single author, list them by last name, followed by their initials.

  • Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

If there are two authors, list them by last name, followed by their initials. Separate authors’ names with a comma. The second author is preceded by an ampersand. 

  • Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2017). The next big five inventory (BFI-2): Developing and assessing a hierarchical model with 15 facets to enhance bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1), 117–143. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000096

If there are three to 20 authors, list them by last names, followed by their initials. Separate authors’ names with commas. The last author is preceded by ampersand. 

  • Johnson, N. F., Velasquez, N., Restrepo, N. J., Leahy, R., Gabriel, N., El Oud, S., Zheng, M., Manrique, P., Wuchty, S., & Lupu, Y. (2020). The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views. Nature, 582(7811), 230–233. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1

If there are more than 20 authors, list them by last names, followed by their initials. Separate authors’ names with commas. After the first 19 authors, use an ellipsis in place of the remaining authors. End with the final author’s name. Do not place an ampersand before it. There should be no more than 20 names in the citation in total.

  • Pegion, K., Kirtman, B. P., Becker, E., Collins, D. C., LaJoie, E., Burgman, R., Bell, R., DelSole, R., Min, D., Zhu, Y., Li, W., Sinsky, E., Guan, H., Gottschalck, J., Metzger, E. J., Barton, N. P., Achuthavarier, D., Marshak, J., Koster, R., … Kim, H. (2019). The subseasonal experiment (SubX): A multimodel subseasonal prediction experiment. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 100(10), 2043–2061. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0270.1

Titles are italicized for non-periodical websites, webpages, reports, preprints, conference presentations, organizational publications and grey literature, books, conference proceedings published as a book, theses and dissertations, software, datasets, and social media posts. 

Sources are italicized for journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, and conference proceedings published in a journal (in other words, for serial publications).  

Books

Whole authored books

Author, A. (Year). Title of authored book (T. Translator, Trans., # ed., Vol. #). Publisher. DOI or URL (if available)

Whole edited books (without author)

Editor, E. (Ed./Eds.). (Year). Title of edited book. Publisher. DOI or URL (if available)

  • Silverman, D. F., & Propp, K. K. (Eds.) (1990). The active interview. Sage.

Whole edited books (with author)

Author, A. (Year). Title of edited book (E. Editor, Ed./Eds.). Publisher. DOI or URL (if available)

  • Malory, T. (2017). Le morte darthur (P. J. C. Field, Ed.). D. S. Brewer. (Original work published 1469–70)

Book chapters

Author, A. (Year). Chapter title. In E. Editor (Ed./Eds.), Title of book (pp. #–#). Publisher. DOI or URL (if available)

  • Dunlap, R. E., & Brulle, R. J. (2020). Sources and amplifiers of climate change denial. In D. C. Holmes & L. M. Richardson (Eds.), Research handbook on communicating climate change (pp. 49–61). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789900408.00013
  • Heidegger, M. (2008). On the essence of truth (J. Sallis, Trans.). In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic writings (pp. 111–138). Harper Perennial Modern Thought. (Original work published 1961)

Periodicals

Journal articles

Author, A. (Year). Title of article. Journal Name, Volume#(Issue#), pp. #–#. DOI or URL (if available)

Print newspaper and magazine articles 

Author, A. (Year, Date). Title of article. Newspaper/Magazine Name, Volume #(Issue#), #–# (page number or page range if provided).

  • Peterzell, J. (1990, April). Better late than never. Time, 135(17), 20–21.
  • Tate, P. (2007, June 6). Illicit organ trade increasing. The Jordan Times, 3.

Blog posts 

Author, A. (if no author, use title of blog). (Year, Date). Title of blog (if used instead of author, do not repeat title of blog). Publisher. URL 

Websites

Webpages (including news websites without associated print versions)

Author, A. or Name of Group (if no author, use title of page). (Year, Date). Title of page. Site Name (if used instead of author, do not repeat site name). URL

Online newspaper or magazine articles (with associated print versions)

Author, A. (if no author, use title of article) (Year, Date). Title of article (not used here if used as author). Newspaper/Magazine Name. URL

Published Conference Proceedings 

Conference proceedings published in a journal 

Author A. (Year). Title. Journal Name, Volume#(Issue#), pp. #–#. DOI or URL (if available)

  • Scheufele, D. A., & Krause, N. M. (2019). Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(16), 7662–7669. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805871115

Conference proceedings published as a book chapter

Author A. (Year). Title. In E. Editor (Ed./Eds.), Title of proceedings (pp. #–#). Publisher. DOI or URL (if available)

  • Allen, J., Martel, C., & Rand, D. G. (2022). Birds of a feather don’t fact-check each other: Partisanship and the evaluation of news in Twitter’s Birdwatch crowdsourced fact-checking program. In S. Barbosa, C. Lampe, C. Appert, D. A. Shamma, S. Drucker, J. Williamson, & K. Yatani (Eds.), CHI ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1–19). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502040

Unpublished Conference Presentations and Sessions

Author, A. (Year, Date). Title of presentation or session [Paper presentation/Conference session]. Conference name, city, country. URL (if available)

  • Lynch, M. (2003, August 18). Dialogue in an age of terror [Paper presentation]. Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
  • Fistek, A., Jester, E., & Sonnenberg, K. (2017, July 12–15). Everybody’s got a little music in them: Using music therapy to connect, engage, and motivate [Conference session]. Autism Society National Conference, Milwaukee, WI, United States. https://asa.confex.com/asa/2017/webprogramarchives/Session9517.html

Preprints

Author, A. (Year). Title of preprint article. Archive name. DOI or URL (if available)

  • Yang, Y., Zheng, L., Zhang, J., Cui, Q., Li, Z., & Yu, P. S. (2018). TI-CNN: Convolutional neural networks for fake news detection. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00749

Grüning, D. J., Kamin, J., Panizza, F., Katsaros, M., Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). A framework of digital interventions for online prosocial behavior. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ysfm8

Reports & Gray Literature 

Author, A. or Name of Organization. (Year). Title of report (Report/Paper/Publication No. # if provided). Publisher. URL (if available)

Theses & Dissertations

Published (available from a database, an institutional repository, or an archive)

Author, A. (Year). Title of thesis/dissertation (Publication No. # if provided) [Master’s thesis/ Doctoral dissertation, institution awarding degree]. Name of Database. URL (if available)

Unpublished 

Author, A. (Year). Title of thesis/dissertation [Unpublished doctoral dissertation/master’s thesis]. Institution awarding the degree.

  • Yudis, A. (2004). Failed responsibility of the media in the war on Iraq [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Manchester.

Social Media

X posts (formerly tweets)

Author, A. or Name of Group [@handle]. (Year, Date). Title of the post up to first 20 words [Image/Video/Thumbnail with link attached if included] [Post]. X. URL

X profiles (formerly Twitter)

Author A. or Name of Group [@handle]. (n.d.). Posts (or Replies/Media/Highlights/Likes) [X profile]. X. Retrieved Date, Year, from URL

Facebook posts

Author, A. or Name of Group. (Year, Date). Title of post up to first 20 words [Image/Video/Thumbnail with link attached if included] [Status update/Video/Photograph/Infographic]. Facebook. URL

Facebook pages

Author, A. or Name of Group. (n.d.). Home [Facebook page]. Facebook. Retrieved Date, Year, from URL

Instagram photographs and videos 

Author, A. or Name of Group [@handle]. (Year, Date). Title of post up to first 20 words [Photograph/Video]. Instagram. URL

  • Zeitz MOCAA [@zeitzmocaa]. (2018, November 26). Grade 6 learners from Parkfields Primary School in Hanover Park visited the museum for a tour and workshop hosted by [Photograph]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BqpHpjFBs3b/ 

Instagram highlight

Author, A. or Name of Group [@handle]. (n.d.). Title of highlight [Highlight]. Instagram. Retrieved Date, Year, from URL

Instagram profile

Author, A. or Name of Group [@handle]. (n.d.). Posts/Reels/Tagged [Instagram profile]. Instagram. Retrieved Date, Year, from URL

TikTok video

Author, A. or Name of Group [@handle]. (Year, Date). Title of post up to first 20 words [Video]. TikTok. URL

TikTok profile

Author, A. or Name of Group [@handle]. (n.d.). Title of profile page up to first 20 words if provided [TikTok profile]. TikTok. Retrieved Date, Year, from URL

Audiovisual Media

YouTube and other video streaming platforms

Author, A. or Group Name. (Year, Date). Title of video [Video]. Streaming Platform. URL

Podcasts

Host, H. (Host). (Year–Year). Title of podcast [Audio/Video podcast)]. Publisher. URL 

Podcast episodes

Host, H. (Host). (Year, Date). Title of episode (No. # if provided) [Audio/Video podcast episode]. In Title of podcast.Publisher. URL

Data Sets

Author, A. or Name of Group. (Year). Title of dataset (Version #) [Data set]. Publisher. DOI or URL (if available)

  • National Center for Education Statistics. (2016). Fast Response Survey System (FRSS): Teachers’ use of educational technology in U.S. public schools, 2009 (ICPSR 35531, Version V3) [Data set]. National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture. https://doi.org/103886/ICPSR35531.v3

Software

Author, A. or Name of Group. (Year). Title of software [Computer software]. Publisher. URL (if available)

  • Peeters, S., & Hagen, S. (2018). 4CAT: 4chan capture and analysis toolkit [Computer software]. Biostat. https://4cat.oilab.eu

Federal Testimonies & Hearings

Federal testimonies

Title of testimony, # Cong. (Year) (testimony of T. Testifier). URL (if available)

  • Federal real property reform: How cutting red tape and better management could achieve billions in savings, U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 114th Cong. (2016) (testimony of Norman Dong). http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/233107

Federal hearings 

Title of hearing, #Cong. (Year). URL (if available)