How to Reference a Seminar Paper Using APA Style (A Nigerian Student’s Guide)

How to Reference a Seminar Paper Using APA Style (A Nigerian Student’s Guide)

Let’s be honest. The most annoying part of any school project isn’t the research or the typing. It’s the referencing. You’ve successfully written your seminar, but now your supervisor is circling your bibliography with a red pen, shouting about “APA format” and “plagiarism.”

It happens to the best of us.

Whether you are an undergraduate at OAU or preparing for a presentation at a polytechnic, getting your citations right is the difference between an ‘A’ and a ‘Re-write.’ If you are wondering how to reference a seminar paper using APA style, you are in the right place.

I’m going to break this down simply so you can fix your reference list and go sleep.

How to Reference a Seminar Paper Using APA Style

Table of Contents

The Basic Formula (Unpublished Seminar Paper)

Most times, when you want to cite a seminar paper in Nigeria, you are citing a paper that hasn’t been published in a journal. Maybe it was a paper presented by a classmate, a senior colleague, or even a lecture note delivered within the department.

In APA 7th Edition (which is what most Nigerian universities use), we treat this as a “grey literature” or an unpublished work.

Here is the exact structure you need to follow:

Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the paper [Unpublished seminar paper]. Name of the Department, Name of the University.

Looks simple, right? But the devil is in the details. You must pay attention to the italics and the brackets.

A Practical Nigerian Example

Let’s make this real. Imagine you are writing a project on Microbiology, and you want to reference a seminar paper written by a student named Emeka Johnson in 2023.

The title of his paper is “The Effects of Local Herbs on Malaria Parasites.” He presented it at the University of Lagos (UNILAG).

Here is how that reference should look in your bibliography:

Johnson, E. (2023). The effects of local herbs on malaria parasites [Unpublished seminar paper]. Department of Microbiology, University of Lagos.

Notice three things here:

The Title: Only the first letter of the first word is capitalized (sentence case). Also, the title is in italics.
The Brackets: The phrase “[Unpublished seminar paper]” is crucial. It tells your reader (and your supervisor) that this isn’t a book or a journal article.
The Location: You end with the specific department and the university.

Handling In-Text Citations

Your reference list is at the end of the document, but what about the body of the work?

When you are writing the essay and you want to mention Emeka’s point, you don’t need the whole long address. You just need the surname and the year.

Parenthetical Citation (At the end of a sentence):

Local herbs have been found to reduce parasite counts significantly (Johnson, 2023).

Narrative Citation (Part of the sentence):

According to Johnson (2023), local herbs can be an effective alternative treatment.

If you master this flow, your work will look professional, and you won’t look like you just copied and pasted from Wikipedia.

What if the Seminar Paper was Published Online?

Sometimes, a seminar paper is uploaded to a university repository or a site like ResearchGate. If you found the paper online, you need to add the URL at the end.

The Formula changes slightly: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of paper [Seminar paper]. Name of University. URL

Example:

Adebayo, T. (2024). Artificial intelligence in Nigerian banking [Seminar paper]. Covenant University. https://www.google.com/search?q=https://covenant.edu.ng/repository/ai-banking

Common Mistakes Your Supervisor Will Catch

I’ve seen students lose marks for silly errors. Don’t be one of them. Here are the traps to avoid:

Don’t Italicize the Author’s Name: Only the title of the paper gets italicized.
Don’t Forget the Square Brackets: You must include [Unpublished seminar paper]. If you leave this out, it looks like a book, and that’s wrong.
Check the Date: Seminar papers usually have a specific year. If you aren’t sure, ask the author. Don’t guess.

Also, make sure you aren’t confusing a seminar paper with a conference proceeding. If the paper was published in a book of proceedings (like a big international conference), the format is different. But for 90% of student projects, the format above is exactly what you need.

For more deep dives on weird referencing rules, you can check the official APA Style Blog or consult the Purdue OWL guide, which is the gold standard for citation.

Final Thoughts

Referencing doesn’t have to be a headache. It’s just a matter of following a pattern. Once you set up the first one correctly, you can just copy that style for the rest.

Remember, the goal of a seminar paper is to show you have done the research and can defend your points. Just like when you are learning how to start a debate, your confidence comes from knowing your facts are solid and your sources are credited.

Go finish that paper. You’ve got this.