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APA Style: Using Source Material: References Page

An introduction to APA style for academic papers, based on the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th Edition.

Using Source Material: The References Page(s)

The References list should appear at the end of your paper as follows:

  • The list of References begins on a new page. Center the title References in bold at the top of the page. The page should be double-spaced, and entries should use a hanging indent (the first line of each entry begins at the margin, but the second and all subsequent lines are indented an additional half inch.)
  • List the references in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names; alphabetize unsigned articles by the first word of the title (except for A, An, and The).
  • Each entry should contain the author, the date, the title, and the source.

Authors, Dates, Titles, Sources

Authors’ Names

List authors by last name, followed by a comma and the authors’ initials. For sources with two to twenty authors, include the names of all the authors, using an ampersand (&) before the final name:

Marcek, V. I., Lewis, M. J., & Han, H.

For sources with more than twenty authors, list the first nineteen names, followed by an ellipsis, followed by the final author’s name:

Abbot, A., Ross, L. B., Toma, J. J., Fresquez, M., French, P. F., Stoll, G. D., Schram, M., Eisen, I. F., Nelson, A. B., Tannen, B., Entwhistle, B. J., Tredwell, P. E., Thrisk, N. S., Fiorelli, G., Feldman, R. S., Stuyvesant, P., Southworth, R., Ellington, D., Nordyke, L. N., . . . Takahashi, M.

Dates

Place dates in parentheses after the authors’ names. For journal articles, use only the year; for other sources begin with the year, followed by a comma and the month and day.

Titles

Use sentence case capitalization for titles of works on the references list; that is, capitalize the first letter of the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Use italics for titles of self-contained works (such as books, webpages, and plays).

Journal article title - Plastic legacies: Pollution, persistence, and politics

Book title - Plastic soup: An atlas of ocean pollution

Webpage - Project: Protecting Australia's nature

Sources

The source for a self-contained work (such as a book) is the publisher. The source for a short work contained within a longer work (such as an article in a periodical) is usually the title and publication information for the longer work in which it appears. The source for a webpage is the name of the website, which should be written in title case without italics; omit the source if the name of the website is the same as the name of the author.