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Say that I am writing a scholarly paper in APA-7, and I want to reference a Chinese author's journal article. Let's use this one as an example. How would I go about writing the author's name in the reference list? From what I understand, Chinese names put the surname first, but I am not sure how this would interact with APA-7.

My initial thought would be to write the reference entry like this:

Yongkun, Y. (2023). China's demographic transition: A quantitative analysis. European Economic Review, 160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2023.104591

Is this formatting of the author's name correct?

In Hoc Signo
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1 Answers1

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APA makes no exceptions for cultures which conventionally put the family names before the first names.

And that makes sense. You cannot expect readers to know what culture an author is from. For all I know, Yongkun Yin could be American or Swedish and Yin his or her last name. I'm not familiar enough with Chinese names to know if Yin can be a last name or not. I can't even tell if the name is Chinese or African in origin. And for everyone of us, there are enough languages and cultures that we are not familiar enough with to know what is a first and what a last name and whether in that culture first names are put first or last. For example, did you know that Hungarian puts last names first, too?

Therefore, when you write something like `Xxxxx, X." in APA style, it means that it is a family name followed, after the comma, by an abbreviated first name.

See also: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2017/05/whats-in-a-name-cultural-variations-in-name-order.html

Ben
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