About

What this guide is for

This guide was created to provide assistance with citation for business sources, many of which can be difficult to fit into the templates of common citation styles. It is based on the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th ed. All page and section numbers refer to this manual.

Although the guide also contains some general guidance on using the APA citation style, its main focus is complex business sources. We recommend that you visit your local library's website for areas of APA that are not covered here.

What this guide is not for

  • This guide is not focused on common types of sources that are covered well by other APA guides (e.g., books, most journal articles, or basic websites).
  • It also is not intended as a place where you can ask citation questions. Please contact your local library if none of the resources listed in this guide come close to the specific resource and issue you are dealing with.
  • Also see our Disclaimer for further discussion of the limitations of this guide.

Who is responsible

This APA Guide is a result of a collaborative effort of many BC College and University Librarians. To edit this wiki you must be a contributor associated with the Business Librarians of B.C. group.

Librarians involved in the development of this wiki (past and current) represent the following institutions:

Contact

Email the APA for Business Sources Admin team to report an error in a citation or a technical problem with this site: apabiz-admin@sfu.ca. Include the page's URL in your message.

Please remember that APA Style lacks clear guidance and templates for many business resources, so some interpretation of the rules is necessary. It's possible that others may choose to interpret and apply the rules differently for the same resources.

Note: We do not accept or respond to email questions about how to cite other resources or how to integrate citations into a report. Please contact your local library for such assistance.

History

The Business Librarians of BC (BUSLIB-BC), an informal group of academic business librarians, noticed that several members were creating very similar guides to citing business resources in APA style -- an inefficient duplication of effort.

We formed a team and charged it with investigating platforms and procedures for a single, collaborative guide -- one that would have a BC focus (BC librarians building it, BC examples used where possible) and that would provide consistent, current, and quality business resource citation examples for all BC researchers.

Sarah Parker (then at SFU) and Anita Chan (then at Capilano University), did much of that initial work, including creating the initial wiki platform. The team then expanded to focus on the content and structure of the wiki. Some of the peopke involved in that development phase include Linda Matsuba & Deirdre Grace (BCIT), Mark Bodnar (SFU), and Ulrike Kestler (KPU), but others offered advice and support. (For example, ELN staff (including Brandon Weigel) arranged for the wiki to be hosted on ELN servers. ELN was chosen as a neutral site, in part because that meant that the wiki wouldn't appear to be "owned by" (and the sole responsibility of) any single institution.)

We moved to a beta phase in the summer of 2017 and to a soft launch in the fall of 2017, at which point other members of the BUSLIB-BC group began contributing to the content.

License

This guide was created in a spirit of sharing and mutual support, so its success will only be enhanced if it is shared further.

Cc-by-nc-sa icon This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License