APA (7th ed.) Citing Guide: Textual Works

What are Textual Works?

Textual works refer to written works. It doesn't matter where you find the textual work, for example, an online book or a report on a website, or the format.

Items in this category include:

• periodicals, items published on a regular reoccurring basis such as magazines, newspapers, journals
• books, ebooks
• reference works (e.g. dictionaries, encyclopedias)
• reports (e.g. annual report, government or agency report, financial report)
• gray literature (e.g. press release, code of ethics)
• conference sessions and presentations
• dissertations and theses

Key Terminology

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

• combination of numbers and letters uniquely identifying the article
• used for scholarly or academic books or journals
• can be entered at https://www.doi.org/ to verify the article information

Volume

• refers to all issues published in a particular year
• similar to a "season" for a TV series

Issue

• refers to each item published within a particular volume
• similar to an "episode" in a "season" for a TV series

Dates (See Publication Manual, Section 9.13)

• can have 3 components: year, month, day
• depending on the source, you use just the year or year and month or year, month, and day
• specific dates (year, month, day) are used for items published more frequently, for example, news articles, blog entries
• magazines typically use year and month  if they are published monthly, but will use year, month, and day if they are published multiple times in a month
• journals typically only use year

Article number or eLocator

• some databases assign unique numbers to articles; usually open access databases do this; the same article may appear more than once in search results and not consistently include the eLocator; use your discretion when choosing which result to cite
• they look like "e1234567"