In APA style, all the sources you cite throughout the text of your paper are listed together, and more fully, in the References section, which comes after the main text of your paper.

Formatting the References Section

The top of the page, as the rest of your paper, should still include the running header on the left and the page number on the right. On the first line, the title of the page—“References”—should appear centered and not italicized or bolded. (As is the case with the “Abstract” page title, this does not count as an actual heading, so it is not formatted per the heading guidelines.) And, like the rest of your paper, this page should also be double-spaced.

Starting on the next line after the page title, your references should be listed in alphabetical order by author. Multiple sources by the same author should be listed chronologically by year within the same group.

Each reference should be formatted with what is called a hanging indent. This means the first line of each reference should be flush with the left margin (i.e., not indented), but the rest of that reference should be indented one inch from the left margin. Any word-processing program will let you format this automatically so you don’t have to do it by hand. (In Microsoft Word, for example, you simply highlight your citations, click on the small arrow right next to the word "Paragraph" on the home tab, and in the popup box choose "hanging indent" under the "Special" section. Click OK, and you're done.)

References

This is an example of the first page of a References section properly formatted in APA style.

Constructing a Citation

The first step in building each individual citation is to determine the type of resource you are citing, since in each citation style formatting differs slightly based on source type. Some common types are a book, a chapter from a book, a journal article, an online book or article, an online video, a blog post, and personal communication such as an email or an interview you conducted. (You'll notice that "website" is not a category by itself. If the information you found is online, you want to determine if you're looking at an online book, an online article, or some other type of document.)

As an example, let's look in detail at the process of citing three particular sources in APA style: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (i.e., a book by one author), Project Gutenberg's online text of the same book (i.e., an online book), and an online journal article about the book.

Print Sources

Author Name

You always want to start with the author information. You should present the author information in the following order and format: the author's last name (capitalized), a comma, the author's first initial, then a period, and finally their middle initial and period (if given):

• Conrad, J.

Date of Publication

After the author's name, you provide the year, inside parentheses, in which the source was published, followed by a period. It may look odd, but make sure your period is outside the parentheses.

• (1993).

Title of Source

Next, you should include the title of the source in sentence case. For a book, the title is italicized.

• Heart of darkness.

City of Publication

Next, you want to provide the location of the publisher's office. The location is generally a city, such as "London" or "New York, NY."

• London:

Publisher Name

Next, provide the publisher's name, followed by a period:

• Everyman's Library.

All together, then, the citation looks like this:

• Conrad, J. (1993). Heart of darkness. London: Everyman's Library.

Online Sources

Now let's take a look at the citation for the online version of the same book, available online through Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Much of the citation is the same:

• Conrad, J. (2006). Heart of darkness. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm

Journal Articles and Multiple Authors

• NooriBerzenji, L. S., & Abdi, M. (2013). The image of the Africans in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart. Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business, 5(4), 710–726.

Much of this citation will look familiar to you now that you know the basics. Again, we start with the author information. This article has multiple authors, so we list them in the same order in which they are listed in the source, and in the same format as before (last name, first initial, middle initial), separated by commas. The last author should also have an "and" sign, or ampersand (&), before it. Here we have only two authors, but if we had five, the ampersand would come before the fifth author's last name, after the comma following the fourth author's name.

The date of publication and title are formatted the same. Note that even though APA style says that the article title should not be italicized, the book titles “Heart of Darkness” and “Things Fall Apart” within the article title are still italicized.

The new information here begins with citing the journal this article is from. Include the title of the journal in italicized title case (all major words capitalized, as in the title of a book), followed by a comma:

• Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business,

Then include the journal volume, also italicized:

• 5

If the particular journal you're citing lists an issue number in addition to the volume number, as this one does, include it in parentheses immediately after the volume, and do not italicize it. Then follow it with a comma.

• 5(4),

Finally, list the page numbers of the article, followed by a period [note that the dash between the first and second numbers is an en-dash (–), not a hyphen (-) or em-dash (—)]:

• 710–726.

Multiple Publications by the Same Author in the Same Year

If you are referencing multiple publications by the same author (or group of authors) that were published in the same year, there is a special rule for denoting this. You should first order those articles alphabetically by source title in the References section. Then, append a lowercase letter in alphabetical order to the end of each year of publication:

• Achenbach, T. M. (2012a). Bibliography of published studies using the ASEBA. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment: http://www.aseba.org/asebabib.html
• Achenbach, T. M. (2012b). School-age (ages 6–18) assessments. Retrieved March 18, 2012, from Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment: http://www.aseba.org/schoolage.html

A Note on Capitalization

In the guidelines for citing different types of sources in APA style, you will notice several different patterns in capitalizing source titles. A work that stands on its own—a book, a painting, a film, etc.—should be written in italicized title case (every major word capitalized). A source that is part of a larger work—a chapter in an anthology, an article in a journal, a web page, etc.—should be written in sentence case and not italicized. (Recall that sentence means that just the first word and proper nouns are capitalized, as well as the first word after a colon, if there are any). As an example, compare the citations of Heart of Darkness and the NooriBerzenji & Abdi (2013) article.