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APA Style 7th Edition

This guide explains the basics of APA Style 7th Edition.

Reference List and Citations

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. Depending on the source (book, article, magazine, etc.), the way a citation is formatted will vary slightly. However, the overall format will be consistent. For a general idea of how a reference page should look, review these nine rules:

  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, 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.

No Author

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 the continue with other citation details.

Note: an author/creator won't necessarily be a person's name. It may be an organization or corporation, for example Health Canada or a username on a site such a YouTube.

In-Text

If no author or creator is provided, use a shortened version of the title where you'd normally put the author's last name. 

If you're citing something which is part of a bigger work, like an article from a magazine, newspaper, journal or encyclopedia, or chapter or short story from a book, put the shortened title in quotation marks in your in-text citation. 

Example, paraphrasing: ("A few words", 2014) 

If you're citing an entire work, like a book, website, video, etc., italicize the shortened title in your in-text citation

Example, 'paraphrasing: (A few words, 2014)

Anonymous

If and only if an item is signed as being created by Anonymous, use "Anonymous" where you'd normally put the author's name.

Alphabetical Order in References List

When putting works in alphabetical order, ignore initial articles such as "the", "a", or "an". For example the title The best of Canada would be alphabetized as if it started with the word best instead of the word The

If the title begins with a number, alphabetize it as if the number was spelled out. For example the title 5 ways to succeed in business would be alphabetized under F as if it had started with the word Five.

No Date

If no date is provided, use the initials n.d. where you would normally put the date. Also use the initials n.d. if the date of content is difficult to determine, such as on a Wikipedia page.

No page numbers

Page numbers may not be provided for some items, such as online materials. If this is the case:

References List

If a citation would normally include page numbers but none are provided, skip the page numbers in the citation.

In-Text Citation - Quoting Directly

When quoting directly in the text of your paper, you would normally include page numbers if they were given. If there are no page numbers given:

  • Indicate the paragraph number instead of the page number with the word "para." before it. For example: (Smith, 2012, para. 3)
  • If there are headings, give the name of the heading, followed by the word "section" and the number of the paragraph within the section it is from. For example: (Smith, 2012, Discussion section, para. 3)
  • If there is only one paragraph, provide the author's last name and the year and omit the page number.

No title

Occasionally an item may not have a title. If you are citing something with no identified title, write a description of the item placed in square brackets. Put this description in brackets where you'd normally put the title.

Sometimes an author of a book, article or website will mention another person’s work by using a quotation or paraphrased idea from that source. The work that is mentioned in the article you are reading is called the primary source. The article you are reading is called the secondary source.

For example, suppose you are reading an article by Brown (2014) that cites information from an article by Snow (1982) that you would like to include in your essay. For the reference list, you will only make a citation for the secondary source (Brown). You do not put in a citation for the primary source (Snow) in the reference list. For the in-text citation, you identify the primary source (Snow) and then write "as cited in" the secondary source (Brown). If you know the year of the publication of the primary source, include it in the in-text citation. Otherwise, you can omit it. See below for examples.

Examples of in-text citations:

According to a study by Snow (1982, as cited in Brown, 2014), 75% of students believe that teachers should not assign nightly homework.

Note: If you don't have the publication date of Snow's article, you just omit it like this:
According to a study by Snow (as cited in Brown, 2014), 75% of students believe that teachers should not assign nightly homework.

In fact, 75% of students believe that teachers should not assign nightly homework (Snow, 1982, as cited in Brown, 2014).

Snow (1982, as cited in Brown, 2014) concluded that "nightly homework is a great stressor for many students" (p.34).

Example of Reference list citation:

Brown, S. (2014). Trends in homework assignments. Journal of Secondary Studies, 12(3), 29-38. http://doi.org/fsfsbit