Do you know what a DOI is and when it should be used in an APA citation?

DOI is short for digital object identifier and it provides a persistent link to an individual work.  If available, an assigned doi should be included in your APA reference citation for electronic journal articles and book chapters, as well as for print articles.  In general, scholarly/research journals and some online books are assigned a doi, while most magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and online documents/reports do not have a doi.

Example:

D'Abate, C. P., Youndt, M.A., & Wenzel, K.E. (2009).  Making the most of an internship: An empirical study of internship satisfaction.  Academy of  Management Learning & Education, 8(4), 527-539. 
doi:10.5465/AMLE.2009.47785471

CrossRef, a service for linking citations across publishers, provides three free and easy ways to locate a DOI:

• If you have bibliographic data for an item and would like to find the DOI,  use the metadata search;
• If you only have an article title and author, use the article title search;
• If you have a reference list or bibliography, cut and paste the list into the Simple Text Query search box.