You are entirely responsible for your own references, even if you do get assistance from library staff or anyone else. Library staff will not check your references for you, but they may give you feedback and advice on your references. However, you make the final call on how you write and format your references.
There are a number of resources that you can use to check your references yourself. This library guide is a good start, but if you can't find the answer you need you can consult the APA 7th publication manual or the APA style website.
If you need help getting started with APA referencing, you can attend a workshop or watch this video tutorial. You can also talk to your lecturers.
It is preferable to locate the original source if possible. However, you can also cite this source in your work.
This is called a secondary citation. If you wanted to cite Rabbit's work from 1982 which Lyon et al. refer to in their work from 2014, the in text citation would look like this:
(Rabbit, 1982, as cited in Lyon et al., 2014)
If the year of the primary source is unknown, omit it from the in-text citation.
Do not provide a reference to Rabbit's work in your reference list.
You should cite it as a journal article using the format for journal articles. The webpage citation format should only be used if there is no other reference category that fits. So, for online videos, use the video format. For social media, use the social media format. For e-books, use the e-book format.
DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier. Most online journal articles and some books have DOIs. If a resource has a DOI, it must be included in its reference. A DOI can look like this doi:10.1038/nature11241 or this https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1585-4. In your reference list, you must use the second format (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1585-4). You can turn the first format into a URL by removing 'doi:' and replacing it with 'https://doi.org/'.
You can more or less tell what format a resource is based on the APA reference. In APA 7th, many formats are explicitly stated in the reference, such as editorials, press releases and conference presentations. But even in examples like book chapters, articles and most reports, which don't state the format in the reference, you can tell which of these formats a resource is based on the structure of the reference and the information it provides.
The easiest way to identify if a resource is an article is to look for the journal title. It often has the word 'journal' in it but it might not. After the journal title, it should have the the volume and issue numbers which look like this "12(2)". It won't have the publisher's name at the end, like a book reference would.
To identify a chapter from an edited book, look for the information after the title of the chapter. If it says "In..." followed by the editor(s)' names, the title of the book, the page range and the name of the publisher, you can know that it is a chapter from an edited book. Chapters in an edited book are often written by different authors.
Reports are harder to identify as they have a similar structure to some other formats such as books or websites. Look for the word 'report' in the title or the URL, though not all reports will have it. They sometimes have no publisher or the publisher is a government agency or organisation. The date given is just the year, not the year, month day like websites are.
If you have a full journal title and need to know the abbreviated title (or vice versa), try the following tools: