APA Style: References

Reference List Examples from Murdoch University

Popular APA Citation FAQs

Annotated Sample Paper

Rules for an APA Reference List

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. Here are nine quick rules for this Reference list.

1. Start a new page for your Reference list. Centre the title, References, at the top of the page.
2. Double-space the list.
3. Start the first line of each reference at the left margin; indent each subsequent line five spaces (a hanging indent).
4. Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the reference. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
5. For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first (and middle, if listed) initials followed by periods.
6. Italicize the titles of these works: books, audiovisual material, internet documents and newspapers, and the title and volume number of journals and magazines.
7. Do not italicize titles of most parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document.
8. In titles of non-periodicals (books, videotapes, websites, reports, poems, essays, chapters, etc), capitalize only the first letter of the first word of a title and subtitle, and all proper nouns (names of people, places, organizations, nationalities).
9. If a web source (not from the library) is not a stable archived version, or you are unsure whether it is stable, include a statement of the accessed date before the link.

Periodical Format

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyy

Basic Book Format

Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Publisher Name. DOI (if available)

Electronic Sources Format

Lastname, F. M. (Year, Month Date). Title of page. Site name. URL

APA Style 7th Edition: Reference Lists

APA 7th Edition: Formatting the APA Reference Page