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APA Citation Guide: Reference List & Sample Paper

This guide shows you how to cite references in current (7th edition) APA style

Sample Paper & Reference List

The APA Style Blog offers sample papers formatted in seventh edition APA Style.
The sample papers show the format students should use to submit a course assignment and that authors should use to submit a manuscript for publication in a professional journal. If you are writing or publishing an APA Style paper in another context (e.g., for a dissertation), check with your instructor or publisher for additional formatting guidelines.

APA Student Paper Checklist

Finished your assignment?

Use this checklist to be sure you haven't missed any information needed for APA style.

Appendices

If you are adding an appendix to your paper there are a few rules to follow that comply with APA 7 guidelines:

  • The Appendix appears after the References list
  • If you have more than one appendix you would name the first appendix Appendix A, the second Appendix B, etc.
  • The appendices should appear in the order that the information is mentioned in your essay
  • Each appendix begins on a new page

For more information, see Jack Caulfield's excellent guide at Scribbr

 

 

 

Caulfield, J. (2020, November 13). How to create an APA Style appendix. Scribbr. 

How to Create an APA Style Appendix | Format & Examples (scribbr.com)

 

General Guidelines for your Reference List

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. Here are nine quick rules for this Reference list.

  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, web 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 a web documents.
  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.