Subject Guides: Vocational Education and Training: Referencing websites and online documents in APA 7th

Tips for referencing websites and online documents (using APA 7th)

You must include an in-text citation and reference list entry for a website/ webpage if you mention specific information from it, whether you are paraphrasing or quoting directly.
If you are talking in general about a website, without mentioning any specific information on that site, simply give the name of the website in the text and include the URL in parentheses. There is no need to include a reference list entry.

Authors:

Give name of corporate author in full (not as an abbreviation or acronym) in the reference list.
Include only the specific agency responsible for the publication - do not include the name of parent organisations (e.g. State Government of Victoria) unless you need to avoid ambiguity.

Date:

Provide as specific a date as possible for webpages (as displayed on the individual page) or use (n.d.) if there is no date given.
Some online works note when the work was last updated. If this date is clearly attributable to the specific content you are citing rather than the overall website, use the updated date rather than the year of creation or copyright.

Title:

Give the title of the specific page. If there is no title, give a short descriptive phrase in square brackets.

Site name:

In many cases, the website's name is the same as the name of the corporate author. Whenever this is the case, omit the site name from the reference list entry to avoid repetition.

The first time you refer to an organisation or government body in an in-text citation, include the full name, followed by the abbreviated form or acronym (if it is well-known and commonly-used) in square brackets. e.g. (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations [DEEWR], 2009).
In subsequent in-text citations, include only the abbreviated form or acronym (if it is well-known and commonly-used) e.g. (DEEWR, 2009)
When quoting directly from a PDF, include a page number, e.g. (DEEWR, 2009, p. 11).
When quoting directly from a webpage, include the section title or paragraph number, e.g. (VCAA, n.d., para. 3). If paragraphs are not numbered, simply count them yourself.

Reference each webpage separately and use lower case letter suffixes (as described in following section below) to distinguish between each one.

When you refer to more than one source published by the same author in the same year, distinguish each source by using a lower-case letter immediately after the year within the brackets.
In the reference list, order these works alphabetically by title. In-text citations should include the same corresponding letter.

NOTE: If the date is given as (n.d.), add a hyphen before the lower-case letter. e.g. (n.d.-a)

… other strategies are mentioned (Department of Education and Training [DET], 2019a)

… as described in the Toolkit (DET, 2019b)

Department of Education and Training. (2019a). High impact teaching strategies: Excellence in teaching and learning.

Department of Education and Training. (2019b). Literacy teaching toolkit. https://www.education.vic.gov.au/

For more information on how to reference webpages, visit the APA Style website: