Reference List Format
What is a Reference list?
APA style requires you to provide, at the end of your paper, a list of the sources you have cited. The list should be double-spaced, and each line after the first one in each entry should be indented. The title of the list should be "References" and should be centered at the top of the page. You can see a sample References list here.
Each source on your reference list should include the following four elements:
Author: Who is responsible for creating the source?
The author should be listed first in each reference list entry, and the list should be alphabetical by last name. If there is more than one author, you should list each one last name first, and separate them by ampersands.
Date: When was the source published?
For books, you should include the date of publication. For journal articles, you should include the year of the volume listed. For websites and webpages, you should not use the copyright date on the website footer, which may not apply to the content on individual pages. Instead, look for a “last updated” date or a date at the top of a web article. If you are citing a website that may change, you should also include a retrieval date (the date you found and read the source). If you can’t find a publication date, list “n.d.” for no date in parentheses where the date would be listed.
Title: What is the title of the source?
In an APA reference list, titles are listed in sentence case, which means you only capitalize the first word of the title, the first word of the subtitle, and any word that appears after a colon, dash, period, or question mark. You should always capitalize proper nouns.
Sources that stand alone, like books or websites, should be listed in italics like this:
Follow the new way: American refugee resettlement policy and Hmong religious change
If you are citing a source that is contained in another source, such as an article in a book or a page on a website, you should include both titles. Sources that are part of other sources should not be listed in italics or in quotation marks like this:
Pandemics have long created labor shortages. Here’s why. Washington Post
Source: Where can the source be found by your readers?
While we talk about sources as the texts, films, and other documents that you cite in your research, APA uses “source” to mean the place where what you are citing can be found by your readers. The source for a book chapter is the book; the source for a journal article is the journal; the source for a web page, database, or social media site should include a URL or DOI.