APA Tricky Situations: To Italicize or To Not Italicize? Moving A Source to the “Author” Element of a Reference Entry
- Feb 18
- 2 min read
February 18, 2026
Brianna Torres
Lead Editor
APA 7 can sometimes be tricky—while there exists a detailed manual that answers many questions, some scenarios just don’t have straightforward answers. In this series, I cover tricky APA encounters so that you can know how to approach them. With that being said, let’s get started!
Certain types of sources—such as blog posts, magazine articles, and news articles—are italicized in the source element of APA reference entries, such as in the case of this article about microplastics. The correct reference entry for this article is:
Woodall, T. (2026). Some bottled water worse than tap for microplastics, study shows: Insights could inform future efforts to remove plastic from environment. Ohio State News. https://news.osu.edu/some-bottled-water-worse-than-tap-for- microplastics-study-shows/
But what about when there isn’t an individual author? APA says to move the “source” to the “author” element in the reference entry for these kinds of sources. The name of the blog, news site, or magazine then becomes the “author”—at least according to your reference list.
While APA makes clear that in general, author elements are not italicized in the reference entry, ambiguity arises when the author element is actually the name of the source—which would have been italicized had there been an individual author.
So this is tricky! But the answer is simple—don’t italicize it. Not in the reference list, and not in the in-text citation. Instead, italicize the title of the blog post, magazine article, or news article as you would for a webpage (Section 10.16) or report (Section 10.4), as shown below:
Times Flow Stemmed. (2013, April 21). Simple existence.
In APA, placement matters. When an element moves, its formatting depends on its new position—not its original role.
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