By Kate Moss, Ph.D, Doctoral Lecturer and Full-time Faculty, General Education & BA in Liberal Studies Writing Fellows (WAC) and Tutoring Coordinator
Putting references into APA 7 style (or another citation style) can be time consuming, and you may want to take advantage of citations generated automatically by the library databases or a citation generator on the Internet. Using citation generators can make your job easier as long as you know how to use them correctly and do so with caution.
Citation generators – even the ones used by the Newman Library databases — often produce errors. It’s your job to double check the citation which is generated by looking at the source and to make any needed corrections.
For example, here is an article from Pew Research: “Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable”. The four authors are listed above the article as: Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, J. Baxter Oliphant and Elisa Shearer:
At the time of this writing (12/2023), I put the URL of this article into Chegg’s Citation Machine, and it produced this citation in APA style:
Mitchell, A. (2020, July 30). Americans who mainly get their news on social media are less engaged, less knowledgeable. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/07/30/americans-who-mainly-get-their-news-on-social-media-are-less-engaged-less-knowledgeable/
This citation is almost correct. However, it omits three of the listed authors. In APA 7 style References lists, you need to list all of the authors for a work, if there are fewer than twenty.
Since the generated citation is wrong, you would need to correct it as follows:
Mitchell, A., Jurkowitz, M., Oliphant, J.B., & Shearer, E. (2020, July 30). Americans who mainly get their news on social media are less engaged, less knowledgeable. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/07/30/americans-who-mainly-get-their-news-on-social-media-are-less-engaged-less-knowledgeable/
When you click the link to copy a citation for a resource you find in the Newman Library, you also need to check it for accuracy, since these automatically-generated citations can also contain errors.
Resources:
- Resources from Purdue OWL and Pine Technical and Community College explain how to cite works with various numbers of authors.
- This resource from Excelsior OWL shows how to cite an article on a website.
