How do I reference… a conference paper in the APA7 style?

Many of you will be using conference papers in your work. Some of these will also have been published as articles in the traditional way – but others are not. So, how do you go about referencing a conference paper in your work?

First of all, you need to collect together the following ‘elements’ to build your reference:

• Author or authors – in the format Surname, Initials.
• Date(s) of conference in full – in the format (Year, Month Day(s)).
• Title of conference paper [followed by type of paper],
• Title of conference, Location of conference.
• URL or DOI (if available online)

Each element of the reference needs to be separated from the next by a full-stop and a space.

Conference paper image taken from https://naplesforumonservice.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Razmdoost.pdf

So, if we were using this conference paper in an assignment or an article, its bibliographic reference would look like this:

Razmdoost, K., Alinaghian, L. & Kutsch, E. (2021, September 6-9). Practice disruption in service ecosystems: the case of K2 2008 disaster [Conference paper]. 7th Naples forum on service, Naples, Italy.

Remember that APA7 references should all be formatted with a hanging indent.

Your in-text citations (where you refer to the work within your own text) would simply include the authors’ surnames and the year of publication so they would be…

Razmdoost, Alinaghian & Kutsch (2021) or, where you were quoting directly, Razmdoost, Alinaghian & Kutsch (2021, p3).

Any questions about referencing? Consult our Referencing and Plagiarism pages or drop us an email here.

Please note: Cranfield supports two different referencing styles – APA7 (Author-date) and Numbered (NLM). Please make sure you use the style preferred by your supervisor or lecturer. The advice above relates only to the APA7 style. If you have any questions about referencing, please contact the Library.

Feature image from Pixabay. Available at: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/06/01/06/26/open-book-1428428_960_720.jpg