APA Citation: Reference List

• Books
• Articles
• Webpages & Websites
• Reports & Gray Literature
• Class or Course Materials
• Reference Materials (encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.)
• Indigenous Elders & Knowledge Keepers
• Chat GPT & AI
• Social Media
• Audiovisual Works (movies, songs, photos, etc.)
• Personal Communications
• Authors with the Same Surname
• Conferences and Posters

• VCC Style Guide to APA  (PDF)
• Reference Examples (APA Style)
• Reference List: Basic Rules (Purdue University)
• Four Elements of a Reference (Douglas College)
• Further Examples

Overview

The reference list is a list of all sources cited in your APA paper. Each in-text citation should have a corresponding reference list entry. All APA reference list entries contain four main components: Author, Date, Title, Source.

Below is a diagram of where to find the four main components ( Author, Date, Title, Source) of an APA reference entry for a journal article:

How to Get Started: 

• Create the reference list on a separate page at the end of your paper with the title References, centered and bolded.
• References should be in alphabetical order and double spaced.
• Your reference list should be intended with a hanging indent. This means the second line onwards of each citation is indented 0.5 inch. Word processing programs such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs have tools for inserting a hanging indent.

The APA Style website provides sample papers including a reference list.

For stand alone works such as books, italicize the title and use sentence case. Sentence case is when you capitalize the first word of the title and subtitle and proper nouns only. You do not capitalize every word. 

Example:

Rodl, S. (2018). Self-consciousness and objectivity: An introduction to absolute idealism. Harvard University Press.

For works that are part of a greater whole such as articles in journals, do not italicize the title.

Example:

Goor, J., Sools, A. M., Westerhof, G. J., & Bohlmeijer, E. T. (2020). Wonderful life: Exploring wonder in meaningful moments. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 60(2), 147-167. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167817696837

What is a DOI? A digital object identifier (DOI) is an article’s permanent online location. The DOI usually appears at the top of the article or in the database record for the article.

It serves two purposes:

1. It's an article identifier. It's meant to give a recognizable identity to each online resource (e.g., a journal article).
2. It's a type of web link. In fact, it's a type of permanent link, meaning that it's not meant to change. That's different than regular web addresses, which sometimes go offline or get changed during website maintenance or web programming.

Example: http://doi.org/10.25101/19.2