Answered By: Jonathan Faerber (he/him/his)
Last Updated: Nov 15, 2023     Views: 6622

APA Style (7th ed.)

A DOI “is a unique alphanumeric string that identifies content and provides a persistent link to its location on the internet” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p.298). DOIs are presented as hyperlinks in APA Style in the basic format of https://doi.org/xxx; following the International DOI Foundation’s recommended format for DOIs in a reference list.

 If a DOI is available for an article, no other electronic retrieval information is required. If a nondatabase URL is available for articles without a DOI, use this link instead of a DOI; however, if the article hasn’t been assigned a DOI but was retrieved from a password-protected academic research database, do not use the URL instead of the DOI. Use this search tool to check whether a resource has a DOI: http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/. To check your entire reference list for available DOIs, give this tool a try: http://www.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery/

If a DOI is available for an article, or was retrieved from an academic research database, no other retrieval information is required; however, if the article hasn't been assigned a DOI and was not retrieved from a password-protected database, provide the article URL instead of a DOI. See How Do I Reference a Journal Article That Has a DOI in APA Style? and How Do I Reference a Journal Article in APA Style (no DOI)? for more information.

Here's the format for a journal article reference that uses a DOI:

Author, A.A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (year). Title of article. Title of Periodicalxx(x), pp-pp. https://doi.org/xxxxxxxxx

Reference

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000