APA 7th Edition: Guide and Templates: Reference Page

Please be aware that automatically generated citations may not be accurate.

If you choose to use a citation generator, ensure you review and correct the results using this APA guide.

Remember: It is your responsibility to double-check the results!

Authors/Editors

• An author won't necessarily be a person's name. It may be an organization or company, for example, Health Canada. These are called group or corporate authors.
• If an author is also the publisher, put the word "Author" where you'd normally put the publisher's name. This happens most often with corporate or group authors.
• When a book has one to twenty authors or editors, all authors' names are cited in the Reference List entry. When a book has twenty-one or more authors or editors, list the first nineteen authors followed by three spaced ellipse points (. . .) , and then the last author's name. Rules are different for in-text citations!
• If no author or creator is provided, start the citation with the title/name of the item you are citing instead. Follow the title/name of the item with the date of publication, and then continue with other citation details. Remember: An author/creator may be an organization or corporation.
• If, and only if, an item is signed as being created by Anonymous, use "Anonymous" where you would normally put the author's name.

Titles

• Capitalize the first letter of the first word of the title, the first letter of the first word in the subtitle (if present), and proper nouns.
• Example: Following the herd: A study in human behavior in Atlanta, 1923-1946.  

Hyperlinks:

• It is acceptable for hyperlinks to be blue and underlined (live) or black without underlining.
• All hyperlinks must include https://, not just www.
• Do not put a period after DOIs or hyperlinks.
• Be consistent in how you format hyperlinks throughout your paper.

Hanging Indents:

• All citations should be double-spaced and have a hanging indent in References.
• A "hanging indent" means that each subsequent line after the first line of your citation should be indented by 0.5 inches. Use the tab key!
  • Create a hanging indent in Microsoft Word:
    • Highlight the text
    • Right-click, then select Paragraph
    • Find Special, click the down arrow then select Hanging
    • Click OK

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. Center 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, website, 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.

Citing: The process of acknowledging the sources of your information and ideas.

DOI (doi): Some electronic content, such as online journal articles, is assigned a unique number called a Digital Object Identifier (DOI or doi). Items can be tracked down online using their doi.

In-Text Citation: A brief note at the point where information is used from a source to indicate where the information came from. An in-text citation should always match more detailed information that is available in the Reference List.

Paraphrasing: Taking information that you have read and putting it into your own words.

Plagiarism: Taking, using, and passing off as your own, the ideas or words of another.

Quoting: The copying of words of text originally published elsewhere. Direct quotations generally appear in quotation marks and end with a citation.

Reference: Details about one cited source.

Reference Page: Contains details on ALL the sources cited in a text or essay, and supports your research and/or premise.

Retrieval Date: Used for websites where content is likely to change over time (e.g. Wikis), the retrieval date refers to the date you last visited the website.