Below are standard formats and examples for basic information that is bibliographic by the American Psychological Association (APA). To learn more about the APA format, see http://www.apastyle.org.

Your directory of works cited must start at the conclusion of the paper on a new page with the centered title, References. Alphabetize the entries in your list because of the author’s last name, with the letter-by-letter system (ignore spaces and other punctuation.) Only the initials of this first and names that are middle given. An, or The if the author’s name is unknown, alphabetize by the title, ignoring any A.

For dates, spell out the names of months within the text of your paper, but abbreviate them when you look at the variety of works cited, except for May, June, and July. Use either the day-month-year style (22 July 1999) or the month-day-year style (July 22, 1999) and become consistent. Using the month-day-year style, be sure to add a comma after the year unless another punctuation mark goes there.

Underlining or Italics?

When reports were written on typewriters, the names of publications were underlined because most typewriters had absolutely no way to print italics. You should still underline the names of publications if you write a bibliography by hand. But, by using a computer, then publication names should be in italics because they are below. Check always with your instructor regarding their preference of utilizing italics or underlining. Our examples use italics.

Hanging Indentation

All APA citations should use hanging indents, that is, the initial line of an entry should really be flush left, and the second and subsequent lines should be indented 1/2″.

Capitalization, Abbreviation, and Punctuation

The APA guidelines specify using capitalization that is sentence-style the titles of books or articles, so you should capitalize only the first word of a title and subtitle. The exceptions to this rule would be titles that are periodical proper names in a title that should nevertheless be capitalized. The title that is periodical run in title case, and is followed by the quantity number which, aided by the title, can be italicized.

If you have more than one author, use an ampersand (&) before the name for the author that is last. If there are many more than six authors, list just the first one and use et al. for the remainder.

Place the date of publication in parentheses immediately after the name of the author. Place a period of time after the closing parenthesis. Try not to italicize, underline, or put quotes all over titles of shorter works within longer works.

Format Examples

Allen, T. (1974). Vanishing wildlife of The United States. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society.

Boorstin, D. (1992). The creators: a history of the heroes of this imagination. New York: Random House.

Nicol, A. M., & Pexman, P. M. (1999). Presenting your findings: A practical guide for creating tables. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Searles, B., & Last, M. (1979). A reader’s guide to science fiction. New York: Facts on File, Inc.

Toomer, J. (1988). Cane. Ed. Darwin T. Turner. New York: Norton.

Encyclopedia & Dictionary

Bergmann, P. G. (1993). Relativity. In the encyclopedia that is new (Vol. 26, pp. 501-508). Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary (10th ed.). (1993). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

Pettingill, O. S., Jr. (1980). Falcon and Falconry. World book encyclopedia. (pp. 150-155). Chicago: World Book.

Tobias, R. (1991). Thurber, James. Encyclopedia americana. (p. 600). New York: Scholastic pay someone to write my essay Library Publishing.

Magazine & Newspaper Articles

Format: Author’s last name, first initial. (Publication date). Article title. Periodical title, volume number(issue number if available), inclusive pages.

Note: Do not enclose the title in quotation marks. Put a period of time following the title. Then supply the page range (in regular type) without «pp. if a periodical includes a volume number, italicize it and» If the periodical does not use volume numbers, as in newspapers, use p. or pp. for page numbers. Note: Unlike other periodicals, p. or pp. precedes page numbers for a newspaper reference in APA style.

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

Henry, W. A., III. (1990, 9) april. Making the grade in today’s schools. Time, 135, 28-31.

Kalette, D. (1986, July 21). California town counts town to quake that is big. USA Today, 9, p. A1.

Kanfer, S. (1986, 21) july. Heard any good books lately? Time, 113, 71-72.

Trillin, C. (1993, 15) february. Culture shopping. New Yorker, pp. 48-51.

Website or Webpage

Online document: Author’s name. (Date of publication). Title of work. Retrieved day, year, from full URL month

Note: When citing Internet sources, relate to the precise website document. If a document is undated, use «n.d.» (for no date) immediately after the document title. Break a lengthy URL that goes to another line after a slash or before a period. Continually look at your references to online documents. There isn’t any period following a URL. Note: If you cannot find several of this information, cite what is present.

Devitt, T. (2001, 2) august. Lightning injures four at music festival. The Why? Files. Retrieved January 23, 2002, from http://whyfiles.org/137lightning/index.html

Dove, R. (1998). Lady freedom among us. The Electronic Text Center. Retrieved June 19, 1998, from Alderman Library, University of Virginia website: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/subjects/afam.html

Note: If a document is contained within a large and complex website (such as for instance that for a university or a government agency), identify the host organization as well as the relevant program or department before giving the URL for the document itself. Precede the URL with a colon.