How to Cite a Podcast APA?

Citing a podcast in academic work may seem to be an unusual thing to do, as professors traditionally rely on peer-reviewed academic sources as the only acceptable materials with external evidence and supporting facts. However, things are changing, especially in such dynamic disciplines as Political Science, Social Science, and the study of Media and Mass Communications. In modern classes, podcasts have already become an equally reliable and valuable source of academic information for many students and educators, as they can deliver fresh insights on pressing topics and offer novel approaches to the study of well-known things.

Therefore, knowing how to cite a podcast in the APA format has become one of the students’ critical study skills, alongside the citing conventions for books, academic journals, and periodicals. Here we cover the basics of APA citations for podcasts and examine the overall APA approach to citing sources to help you out with the referencing effort.

So, let’s examine an anatomy of the APA reference for a digital podcast you may need to place in your next academic assignment. To make the reference correct, complete, and properly organized, you should include the following details into it:

• Author’s name and last name.
• The author’s credentials and role in their organization (it’s an important aspect adding credibility to their opinion and facts shared in the podcast).
• Full date of the podcast’s publication (you should include the date, month, and year in the date’s section).
• Title of the source.
• Type of the source (indicate “podcast” in this case, preferably in square brackets).
• The URL address of the podcast you’re referring to.

Overall, this information should be available for any podcast published online. The authors and participants of these shows are personally interested in giving that data to disseminate this material and attract as many listeners to it as possible. Besides, giving all that data is a sure way to avoid unlawful copy-pasting of the podcast information and its republishing without the author’s consent.

Still, if you fail to locate any of the information we’ve just mentioned in the list above, the automated citation generator tool can help you out. As a rule, the information about podcast shows is stored in the page’s metadata, and as soon as you have the podcast’s URL, the rest of the details can be automatically elicited by the generator online. Check this functionality out to see how it works.

Besides proper citations of the chosen podcasts in the reference list, you should learn to refer to them in the body of your text correctly. Here, a brief recap of the general APA rules will be of much value. APA requires students and scholars to cite sources using the author-date format, which looks as follows:

(Jeremy, 2021)

(Johnson & Johnson, 2020), etc.

If you don’t have the name of the podcast’s organizer or host, you can stick to its title only and cite it the way APA deems correct, for example:

(“Magic and wonders of ancient Egypt,” 2020)

(“The life and death of Napoleon,” 2019).

Finally, if you want to cite a specific fragment of the podcast and refer the readers to its particular part, it’s better to include a timestamp in the in-text citation. It looks as follows:

(Agatha & Briksley, 2021, 0:45).

H2: Citing a Podcast Episode APA

Now it’s time to consider several examples of podcast citations in the reference list to give full guidance to students in terms of proper podcast referencing. We’ll consider several different situations to guide you in the citation creation with varied data amounts about the source at hand.

First, let’s have a look at the classical form of a podcast reference containing all data you can find:

Gobson, L. (Producer). (2013, June 3). Visuals as a source of inspiration [Audio podcast]. Radiolabs. WNYC Studios. http://radio-labs.org/visuals/

If you want to refer to the overall program that one or several hosts hold every week, month, or quarter and that’s published regularly, you may use a more generic citation that doesn’t specify the year of publication but refers to the podcast show in general. For example:

Jeremy, K., & Smith, L. P. (Hosts) (2020). (2018-Present). The wonders of Planet Earth [Audio podcast]. NRW. http://nrw.org/thewonders

Another way to cite a podcast may be used by those who can’t find the authors or publishing organizations. The reference will look shorter, but it will still contain all relevant information of your interest. For instance:

Wonderful people. (2021, September 20). [Audio podcast]. Planet Money. http://planetmoney.org/wonderful-people

As you might understand now, podcasts are a great source of valuable, subject-specific information for many kinds of academic papers. People invited to podcasts as contributors are often professors of renounced universities and colleges, famous writers and analysts, or experienced scholars in specific disciplines. Thus, listening to their expert commentary may be highly informative for your next academic paper, as it will include fresh insights and personal insights from certified professionals in your subject.

However, citing podcasts may seem tricky at first. You should collect and organize all the details of your podcast source to ensure that it looks professional and includes all relevant data about the organizer, contributor, and the platform or organization hosting that material online. Follow the guidelines we’ve shared above, and you won’t face any plagiarism issues or grade reductions because of wrongful or incomplete source referencing.

The rule of thumb for citing online sources is to indicate the URL of the source you’ve used. It’s the so-called home of any digital material stored online. Without a URL, the reader interested in studying your sources and topic in more depth may find it hard to locate the evidence you’ve cited. Besides, indicating the URL is one of the basic principles of proper APA referencing for digital sources, which simplifies the double-check of references and extensive review of your paper’s quality by assessors.

Now that we’ve covered all the details and peculiarities of citing podcasts in the APA format in your papers, it’s time to give you a portion of good news. It’s unnecessary to remember all those rules and apply them every time for manual formatting of every podcast citation in your essays and research papers. We’ve done the legwork for you and have introduced an automated, machine learning-based tool for automatic citation generation.

You will only need to input several characteristics about the podcast you want to cite, and the generator will do the rest of the task instead of you. That’s the way machine learning can work to your benefit and simplify your studies with the help of quick and correct citation creation.

So, how to use the generator? You choose the podcast you want to cite and inset the following data into the tabs:

• Citation style (choose APA 7^th edition)
• Source type (choose podcast)
• Author’s name and last name
• Podcast’s publication date (year, month, and date)
• Podcast’s full title.
• URL of the podcast
• Access date (the date when you used that source in your academic writing)

Once these details are filled out, just press the “generate citation” button and wait for a couple of seconds to see your citation, carefully prepared by the tool. Once it’s displayed on the page, you can copy the full reference and paste it into the reference list you’re preparing. You’re welcome!