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Lund University

Reference guide for APA 7th edition

Reference guide for APA 7th edition intended for students at the department of Biology and CEC, Lund University. NB! If you access the guide using a smartphone, the text will open below the menu.

Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU)

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NB! The APA (7th edition) manual does not contain any specific instructions on how to refer to government publications outside of the United States. The recommendation is instead to format the references according to guidelines in each country. According to Swedish legal practice, you use the official abbreviation for a legal document as your in-text reference and you do not provide a reference in the reference list. Please note that we have chosen to depart from this practice in our instructions by adding a reference in the reference list with information that will help the reader find the source, since the target audience of the texts produced at our departments are usually not legal practitioners. The instructions under this section are our interpretation of how to apply APA (7th edition) to Swedish Government Official Reports (Statens Offentliga Utredningar, SOU). 

When citing Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU), you should make it clear to the reader what type of document you are referring to by including either the title or a description of the document together with the in-text reference the first time you cite the source. If you accessed the Swedish Government Official Report (SOU) online, include the URL of the website from which it was retrieved in the reference.

Do not forget to consult the general instructions on how to write references according to APA (7th edition), including 

Template for how to format references to Swedish Government Official Reports in the reference list

SOU YYYY:Number. Title. URL

Examples of in-text references to reports Swedish Government Official Reports

In the the proposal for a broad agreement on energy policy (SOU 2017:2) it was proposed...

The proposal for a sustainable use of plastics (SOU 2018:84) concluded that...

Examples of references to Swedish Government Official Reports in the reference list

SOU 2017:2. Kraftsamling för framtidens energi [Proposal for a broad agreement on energy policy]. https://www.regeringen.se/rattsliga-dokument/statens-offentliga-utredningar/2017/01/sou-20172/

SOU 2018:84. Det går om vi vill: Förslag till en hållbar plastanvändning [Proposal for a sustainable use of plastics]. https://www.regeringen.se/rattsliga-dokument/statens-offentliga-utredningar/2018/12/sou-201884/