When the Author Is an Organisation
Many of the sources Malaysian postgraduates cite have no individual author — they are published by ministries, agencies, and statutory bodies. The Ministry of Higher Education, the Department of Statistics Malaysia, and Bank Negara Malaysia are all group authors in APA terms, and they are treated as the author of any report they publish. The first time you cite such a source, write the organisation’s full name: (Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, 2022). Treating the organisation as the author, rather than leaving the citation as a bare title or an awkward “Anon”, is the correct APA 7th approach and keeps your reference list properly alphabetised by the organisation name.
Using Abbreviations for Repeated Group Authors
If you cite a group author repeatedly and the organisation has a well-known abbreviation, APA lets you introduce the abbreviation at first mention and use it afterwards. The first citation gives the full name with the abbreviation in square brackets: (Department of Statistics Malaysia [DOSM], 2023). Every later citation then uses only the abbreviation: (DOSM, 2023). This keeps the prose readable when the same agency appears many times, which is typical in a methodology or background chapter that relies on national statistics. Introduce the abbreviation only once, and only if you actually use it again — defining an abbreviation you never reuse simply adds clutter. The reference list, however, always uses the full organisation name regardless of how you abbreviated it in the text.
Formatting Government Bodies in the Reference List
In the reference list, the entry begins with the full organisation name as author, followed by the year, the title of the report in italics, and the publisher. When the organisation is both the author and the publisher — which is usual for ministry reports — APA 7th tells you not to repeat it: list it once as the author and omit it from the publisher position. A common Malaysian complication is the parent-and-department relationship, where a department sits within a ministry; in that case the most specific agency responsible for the work is the author, and the larger body can appear as the publisher if it differs. A further point for Malaysian sources is language: if an agency publishes its report in Bahasa Melayu, cite the organisation and title in the original language and supply a translation of the title in square brackets where your university or journal requires it, rather than silently translating the agency’s name. Checking that every government source is entered under its organisation name, with abbreviations handled consistently, prevents one of the messier citation problems in locally focused theses.
