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Education

Library support for students in the School of Education

General instructions for referencing curriculum documents, standards and confidential information and data

General instructions

These general guidelines apply to the following sources:

  • When using abbreviations in your text, use the full Group Author name the first time, followed by the abbreviation. 
  • When using abbreviations in your in-text citations, in the first instance, include the full name followed by the abbreviation in square brackets, followed by a comma and the year.
  • Abbreviate the name for second and subsequent in-text citations, and in your text.
  • The APA Style website has more information and useful examples. 

Confidential information and data, because of its very nature, is not recoverable by your reader, so should be referenced as personal communication. An example might be the data from OneSchool.
Personal communication should be stated as such in your text, with no entry in the reference list. For example, you might write:

"Data about the school were obtained from the OneSchool website...". 

If you do not want to reveal the name of the website, then you might write: "A regional/state government website that tracks education statistics was the source of the data."

For more information about referencing personal communication, see chapter 16 in the APA7 referencing guide, or the Personal Communications page on the APA7 website.  

Insert a separate reference for each page, follow instructions when the author and date of multiple sources are the same. This can be found in the USQ APA 7 Referencing Guide here, or on the APA style blog at this link.

  • Uniform resource locators (URLs) and digital object identifiers (DOIs) may be shortened if they are very long and complex, for example: 
  • The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (n.d.). F-10 curriculum: English: Year 7, 8, 9, 10 (AC9E9LA01). (Version 9). http://tinyurl.com/bdza3uz2

  • A shortened URL or DOI must be live and take your reader to the correct location. 
  • Any shortened URL can be used. There are many URL shortening services available online and can be found through a quick search of the internet. 
  • DOIs can be shortened using the shortDOI service provided by the International DOI Foundation. 
  • For more information about DOIs and URLs, including formatting and when to include them, please refer to the APA Style website.
     
  • Follow guidelines for Corporate (Group) Author.
    •  If a group author name consists of multiple levels of Government agencies, provide only the most specific level in the reference list entry.
  • Spell out all Corporate (Group) author names in full in the reference list entry.
  • If the author name and the website name are the same, omit the website name from the reference list entry.
  • If individual author names appear on the title or cover page of the work, treat them as the author and use the Group name in the source element of the reference list entry.
  • Use the abbreviation n.d. if there is no date of publication associated with the content you are citing.
  • Do not use the copyright date provided in the footer of the webpage as this may not relate to the actual content you are citing. 
  • Do not include a date of last review in a reference because content that has been reviewed has not necessarily been changed. If a date of last review is noted on a work, ignore it for the purposes of the reference.
  • If a work has a date of a last update, and this date is clearly attributable to the specific content you are citing rather than the overall website, use the updated date in the reference.
  • You do not need to include a retrieval date when the version number is provided. 
  • If there is no version number, or the information is likely to change regularly, include a retrieval date.