American Psychological Association 7th edition

APA references, part by part

Real sources, set as Citation Creation sets them in APA 7th edition. Choose one to see what each part follows.

APA in-text citations

Before you hand it in

Setting out the reference list

The three sources above, as one APA reference list. Every work you cite has a reference here, and every reference is cited in your text.

• Start the list on a new page after your text, headed References, in bold and centred. Not Works Cited or Bibliography. With only one source, Reference is fine.
• Set each reference as one paragraph from the left margin, with a hanging indent of 0.5 inch (1.27 cm): the first line starts at the margin and the rest are indented. Double-space the whole list, with no extra space between references.
• Order the list by the first word of each reference, usually the first author’s surname. Nothing comes before something, so Anders comes before Anderson.
• Works by one author go oldest first, with an undated work (n.d.) at the top. Works the author wrote alone come before works written with others, whatever their years.
• Works by the same author in the same year are put in order of their titles and take a, b and so on after the year: 2019a, 2019b. Use the same letters in your text.
• A group author is spelled out in full, American Psychological Association and not APA. A, An or The at the start is skipped, so The Smithsonian Institution goes under S.
• A work with no author starts with its title and is filed under the title’s first word, again skipping A, An and The: “The Beatles” goes under B.
• Two kinds of source have no reference: emails and conversations, which are cited in the text only, and quotations from your own research participants, which are not cited at all.

Your project’s list is put in APA order for you, and a Word or PDF export is headed References, in bold and centred, double-spaced, with a 0.5-inch hanging indent. A group name or a title that starts with A, An or The is filed under that word, where APA skips it, so move that reference by hand in your paper.

What changed in the 7th edition

• Three or more authors take “et al.” from the first citation. The 6th edition named all three the first time: Smith, Ellenio, and Pruitt (2019).
• A reference names up to 20 authors. With 21 or more, give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the last.
• A publisher is given without its city: “SAGE.”, not “Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.”
• A DOI is a link, https://doi.org/ and its number, with no “DOI:” label. “Retrieved from” goes before a link only when a retrieval date is needed too.
• An organisation that wrote and published a work is named once, as the author. The 6th edition repeated it as “Author” in the publisher’s place.

How Citation Creation handles APA

• Publishers often send titles with a capital on every main word. When a title reads that way, the form offers to change it to sentence case and shows you the result first, so you can check that names keep their capitals.
• Copy narrative citation gives the form for your own sentence, with “and” between two authors: Watson and Crick (1953). A page you add is given on its own, as (p. 737), to go after the quotation.
• An organisation that is the only author and also the publisher, or the site of a web page, is named once, as the author.
• To cite several sources at once, put them together on the Writing order tab, which sets them in alphabetical order with semicolons. Two works by one author keep the name each time, (Zhou, 2000; Zhou, 2016), where APA gives it once, (Zhou, 2000, 2016), so delete the repeat.
• Two sources that shorten to the same “et al.” form, or first authors who share a surname, are not told apart: no names or initials are added. Add them yourself.
• A group’s full name is written in every citation. To use a short form such as WHO, add it to the first citation yourself and shorten the ones after it.

Cite a source in APA now