How to Use APA Style References
The references page allows your reader to easily find any work you cite in your paper. This is because all of your sources will be written up as reference entries on the page. These works should only be ones that you used in your paper. This means you must include entries for all the sources that support the ideas, claims, and concepts you are presenting.
Please note a reference page is different from a bibliography (which you may have had to create in high school). While both will include the sources you used to write your paper, a bibliography will also include works you used for background reading, even if they’re not cited in your paper. Put another way, if you use a source for background research, but don’t use the source’s content to write your paper, then it doesn’t go in your references page.
For every reference entry, there is one or more in-text citation in your report. Every in-text citation is linked to a single reference entry.
What’s in a reference entry?
In APA style, a reference entry needs, at minimum, four elements. These elements tell the reader specific information about where you found your source:
- The author (who wrote the work?)
- The date (how recent is the information you are using?)
- The title (what is the name of the original source?)
- The retrieval information (where can the reader retrieve this work if they want to use it for their own research?)
Every reference entry you write should have these four elements. However, each type of reference entry (a book, a journal article, an online video, etc.) can have some slight variation on what those four elements look like.
Book
MacLennan, J. (2009). Effective communication for the technical professions (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Journal Article
Booth, W. C. (1963). The rhetorical stance. College Composition and Communication, 14(3), 139-145. https://doi.org/10.2307/355048
YouTube Video
Wordvice Editing Services. (2018, April 1). How to paraphrase in research papers (APA, AMA) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VACN6X2eF0
What is the same/different
You should notice that each source type is a little different from the others. For example, (1) and (2) use an author name, but (3) uses an organization name. The title for sources (1) and (3) are italicized, but not for (2). Instead, the name of the journal is italicized.
There are other differences as well, but the point is that you realize that how you format a specific reference entry will depend on the source type. This is because there are dozens of different source types, and one might be formatted slightly differently than another. To be clear, we don’t expect you to know how to format every type of source. What we want you to know is what information to include when you make your own references page and where to go when you have questions.
To make this easier on you, there are automatic reference entry generators you can use, but one point of caution: though these services make writing reference entries easier, they make a lot of mistakes. You need to check to make sure the reference entry is written and formatted correctly.
Fortunately, the two rules for formatting a references page are pretty simple:
- Put references in alphabetical order by the author’s last name or organization’s name.
- If the reference runs over to multiple lines, make sure to indent each successive line in the reference (called a “hanging indent,” which is basically the reverse of a standard indentation).
Attribution
This chapter is an adaptation of 29. How to Use APA Style by Sam Schechter and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. You can download this book free at Professional Writing Today Copyright 2021.
