Publication Date

You are viewing the free, open access version of The Nature of Writing. For all premium membership features (including quizzes, additional lessons, course progress tracking, and more), please register or log in.

Introduction

If you have questions about how to cite the date of a publication following the APA guidelines (7th ed.), please consult the examples below.

Variants

Year of Publication

The default option is to give the year of publication.

Crabby, M., & Grumby, Z. (Eds.). (2011). The anxiety of influence: Why the fear of plagiarism haunts academics. Journal of Insipidity, 24(1), 99-111.

Note the final period after the parentheses.

Month and Day

For frequent publications such as magazines and newspapers, you can give the year, month, and day (if known):

Slinky, B. (2014, May 7). The elephant in the room, or how to tranquilize people with unusually large egos. Popular Anesthetist, 108(4), 33-35.

In some cases you may instead provide the season:

(2015, Spring)

No Date

Use the abbreviation “n.d.” to indicate if a source does not have a date:

Smith, A. (n.d.). Adhocracy. In Dictionary of economic jargon. Retrieved September 19, 2019, from https://www.doej.com/business/adhocracy/

Estimated date

Prenderwick, E. (ca. 1972). Peruvian Pavlovians Society constitution. In T. Droolbug (Ed.), Papers of the Peruvian Pavlovians Society (pp. 23-33). University of Lima Press.

Multiple Years

Multi-volume publications are often published over a longer time period. Provide the first and last date of publication:

Sharp, B. (Ed.). (1999-2009). Famous Freudian slips: The complete anals (Vols. 1-11). Lima, Peru: Parapraxis Press.

In Press

If a work has accepted for publication but has not been officially published, write “in press”:

Blunt, R., Bumbles, T. T., & Wink, M. S. (in press). Can emojis adequately capture the emotional states of adolescents? Digital Communication Trends.

In such cases it is likely that there is no URL or DOI to provide.

If a work is still in progress, or has been submitted but not yet accepted, then don’t provide a description for the date. Simply list the year when the work was created.

 

For more information about citing the date of publication, please see pp. 289-91 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).