How to Cite a Blog in APA?

Students often need to write various assignments, and proper citation of external evidence they’ve used is a mandatory part of the educational process. It’s unethical to leave out the details about the sources you’ve consulted when preparing an essay or a research paper. Thus, academic institutions apply a variety of referencing styles to help students reference their work and document the list of sources they’ve read when familiarizing themselves with the subject.

The most popular referencing styles and APA and MLA. Here we talk about the APA format in particular and discuss the ways you may cite a blog using this referencing style.

Blogs are non-standard academic materials for student use; not every professor accepts their application in academic papers. However, some types of assignments may specifically require an analysis of some online blogs, which poses the student in a position to seek proper APA referencing guidelines ad templates.

APA is an easy style to master; it mostly requires the author-date citation format that every student may embrace without a problem. So, if you’re tasked with referring to a blog in your home task, welcome to this article discussing the intricacies of APA referencing.

Whenever you need to cite a blog, APA format allows using only the author’s name and date in the in-text citation. However, this rule mostly applies to cases where students refer to the whole blog or the entire article on that blog. This format also works when the student uses only general data from the blog and paraphrases all borrowed information. This way, an in-text citation will look as follows: (Jeremy, 2021) or (APA Professional Training, 2020).

If the blog you need to cite doesn’t have an author, it’s possible to use the text’s title and the year of its publication, for instance: (“Memories of a Soldier,” 2022).

Sometimes blog authors don’t indicate the time and date of publication. In such situations, you may cite the author’s name or text’s title (if there is no name) and put “n.d.” instead of the date. For example: (“Memories of a Soldier,” n.d.) or (Jeremy, n.d.).

Now let’s proceed to the overall recommendations for blog post citations in the APA reference list. These rules are universal for online publications and apply to digital journal articles as well. So, when you need to generate a citation of a blog, you should indicate the following details:

• The author’s name and last name.
• The publication date.
• The text’s title.
• Name of the blog where the text/video/audio was published.
• Type of content.
• URL of the blog.

In practice, such a citation would look as follows:

Senator, L. (2021, June 15). Parliamentary immunity in the UK: new insights [blog] Parliamentary Blog. https://parliamentaryblog.com/immunity

If there are no author details in the blog, and the overall blog is maintained by an organization, not a single person, you need to follow the same citation guidelines with a couple of tweaks. Indicate the following data:

• Organization’s name
• Year and date of the post’s publication
• Title of the text/audio/video
• Blog name
• URL

An example of such a citation would look as follows:

UK Barrister Organization. (2021, February 22). Parliamentary immunity changes in 2020. [blog] Parliamentary Blog. https://parliamentaryblog.com/immunity-changes-2020

Again, returning to the basics of citing blogs in the APA format, you need to understand and record some important details about the source you’re going to reference in your paper, such as:

• The blogger’s name
• Title of the cited post
• Blog title
• The date and year of publication
• URL of the source you’re referring to

Once you’ve made notes about this information about every blog post you’re citing, it’s time to use our universal template and fill out the data in a convenient format:

Author’s Last Name, Author’s Initials. (Year of Publication, Month, and Day). Title of the blog post. Title of the Blog. URL of the blog’s location in the digital space.

Now, using this template, let’s cite several blogs with varied amounts of available data about the authors and publication dates.

EXAMPLE #1

Johan, K. (2015, June 23). How we use APA in the university tasks. [Blog] APA Professional Training. https://apa-training.com

EXAMPLE #2

Cassandra, L. (n.d.). A story of my travel to the Philippines. [Blog] Travel Blog by Lane Cassandra. http://cassandra-travel.org

EXAMPLE #3

Visiting a Muslim country: rules and guidelines for not messing everything up. (2022, September 20). Traveler’s Blog. http://travelers-blog.org/visiting-a-muslim-country/

You can apply these rules to citing whatever blog you come across, and there will be no problem or friction with producing a reference if you follow the templates we’ve shared in this post. Be attentive when recording your blog’s details, do some additional research if you can’t find the vital citation details, and make sure to feed all those details into our generator to get a complete citation in the APA format.

We’d also like to cover some broad citation recommendations from the 7^th edition of the APA Citation Manual to help you out in the referencing process and save you from some common mistakes that students commit and lose their vital grade points. The basics of APA referencing should also include the following considerations:

• When citing three and more authors in the source, you should use the “et al” phrase after the first name in the text. Name the full list of authors on the reference page.
• It’s a rule of thumb to use & when citing two authors in-text (e.g., Jones & Jones, 2022).
• If there’s no author name, you should put the blog post’s title in inverted commas and cite it in parentheses. Use the word “Anonymous” only if the source is signed with this name; otherwise, it’s unnecessary to say that the publication is anonymous.
• All references should be listed in alphabetical order in the reference list, except for articles “a,” “an,” and “the.” They are not regarded in the alphabetic organization of the references, so you should be guided by the letter from which the next word after these articles begins.

Using APA citing for a blog post is pretty easy, as you might have already seen. But still, some students new to APA referencing or those who have never cited a blog before can encounter some challenges in the process. We believe that poor knowledge of referencing styles should not become your barrier to high grades, so we have created an automated, machine learning-enabled citation generator to help you out.

Using this generator is very easy, as it offers prompts and requires specific information at every step of your work with this tool. Thus, you will always be able to create complete, correct APA 7 blog citations with the help of our handy generator, saving you time for more important academic tasks.

Here’s what you need to do to make use of our free, student-friendly tool:

• Specify the blog-related content you’re citing (the whole blog, an article or review in it, an interview, etc.).
• Specify the glob’s type for the correct citation generation by our machine (e.g., standard blog, video blog, or podcast).
• Indicate the title of the content you’re citing.
• Specify the author.
• Give detailed publication information (website title, the publisher’s name).

Once you feed that data into our generator’s system and click “generate a citation,” the result will be a neat, concise APA citation of the source you’re using.