APA Reference Page

The Reference page appears at the end of your paper and should include all of and only the sources you cited within your text. By providing the full citation information for your sources in a Reference page you enable readers to access your sources on their own. It very important to accurately reference your sources in scholarly and academic work, because doing so gives your work credibility and integrity.

Formatting the Reference page:

• Title the page References. The word “References” should be centered at the top of the page in the same font and size as the rest of your paper, without underlining, italicizing, etc.
• Alphabetize the list of works cited by the first item in each entry. The first item is usually the author's last name (inverted to last name first in the entry), but if no author is available use the title of the work.
• If you have two or more works by the same author, alphabetize the entries by the date of publication, starting with the earliest.
• If an author appears as the sole author of one work and the first author in a group for another work, place the solely-authored work first.
• If you have two or more works by different authors with the same last name, alphabetize the entries by the first initials of each author.
• If you have two sources by the same author published in the same year, alphabetize the entries by the title and refer to them as (Author, Datea) and (Author, Dateb) in your in-text references.
• If a work has six or more authors, list the first six and then the abbreviation et al.
• The titles of works should be capitalized in the "sentence capitalization" form: only the first word, and in some cases proper nouns, should be capitalized.
• The first names of authors should be reduced to initials (unless you have to distinguish between two authors with the same last name and initials).
• The first line of each entry should be flush with the left margin and the following lines should be indented five spaces.
• Each entry should be double-spaced.
• No additional spaces should be placed between entries.
• The titles of smaller works (a chapter in a book, an article, a poem, a song, a short story, etc.) should be place in double quotation marks in the in-text references and left unformatted in the reference page entry.
• The titles of larger works (an entire book, a film, a magazine, etc.) should be italicized.
• Page numbers should be included in the full citation if the cited work was part of a larger body of work (like an article in a magazine).

Formatting References

The full reference of a work usually includes the author, the publication date, the title, and publication information. Online source citations also include the date you accessed the work url (web address) at which your accessed it. Here are the formats of some common sources:

A book with one author

• Bernstein, T. M. (1965). The careful writer: A modern guide to English usage . New York: Athenaeum.

A book with two authors

• Strunk, W., Jr., & White, E. B. (1979). The elements of style (3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan.

A source with a corporate author

• U.S. Government Printing Office. (1973). Style manual (Rev. ed.). Washington, D.C.: Author

An essay in an edited book or collection

James, J. (1988). In S. Blake's (Eds.), Reader for young adults. New York: Macmillan.

An entry in an encyclopedia

• Bergmann, P. G. (1993). Relativity. In The new encyclopedia britannica (Vol. 26, pp. 501-508). Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.

A magazine article

• Gardner, H. (1981, December). Do babies sing a universal song? Psychology Today , pp. 70-76.

A journal article

• Harlow, H. F. (1983). Fundamentals for preparing psychology journal articles. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology , 55, 893-896.

An online journal article

• Kenneth, I. A. (2000). A Buddhist response to the nature of human rights. Journal of Buddhist Ethics , 8(4).Retrieved February 20, 2001, from http://www.cac.psu.edu/jbe/twocont.html