Understanding the Reference Page

A reference page is a list at the end of a research paper written in APA format. All sources used in the paper are written as reference list entries, individual items that each contain different pieces of information that allow a reader to find the source you used. The reason a reference page is essential is because your readers need to know that the facts, statistics, quotes, and paraphrases in your paper are accurate. Without a reference page, there's no way for a reader to know that you aren't making up facts or misrepresenting the issue you are writing about. A reference page allows for accountability and transparency in academic writing, and it promotes the honest exchange of opinions, arguments, and ideas.

When starting a reference page, begin on a new page after the conclusion of your paper. You'll center the word "References" in bold at the top before the entries. Everything within the reference page should be double-spaced, just like the rest of the paper.

Entries are organized alphabetically by author's last name (or the title if there's no author). it doesn't matter if you start with the last name of a person, the name of a group that functions as the author, or if you don't have an author listed and you start with a title: it's always organized alphabetically by whatever starts the entry. In the "Sample Reference Page" section below, you can see that "National Eating Disorders Collaboration" comes before "Vannucci, A." because "N" comes before "V."

The first line of each entry is against the left page margin, while all lines after that are indented. This allows a reader to see where each entry begins and ends by making the first line easy to see, and this spacing is known as a hanging indent. You can see how it is supposed to look in the examples in the next section.

Sample Reference Page

References

National Eating Disorders Collaboration. (n.d.) Body image. Australian Government Department of Health. https://nedc.com.au/eating-disorders/eating-disorders-explained/body-image/

Vannucci, A., & Ohannessian, C. M. (2018). Body image dissatisfaction and anxiety trajectories during adolescence. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 47(5), 785–795. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2017.1390755

The Parts of a Reference Page

As we explore the different parts of a reference page entry, remember that you do not need to memorize all of this!!! You'll refer back to resources like textbooks, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th ed., or an online style guide like this one or Reference List: Articles in Periodicals from OWL Purdue when you need to write a Reference page. There are too many rules to memorize them all, so whenever you need to create a reference page, have that book beside you or that extra internet window open so you can check that you are doing it correctly!

APA Style divides a reference entry into four elements or sections:

Author
Date
Title
Source

What information you include in each section, as well as how you format and style the pieces of info, varies depending on the type of source you use: articles, webpages, films, and books are all styled differently.

Author

An author is the person, people, or group that was primarily responsible for creating your source. An author's name is written with the last name coming first, then a comma, and then the initials of the first and middle names.

Anderson, S.

Tolkien, J. R. R.

If you have two authors, give both and connect them with a comma and an ampersand (&).

Garcia, E., & Evers, D.

If you have between three and twenty authors, use commas to connect them and use an ampersand before the last author's name.

Johnson, L., Leonardo, G., & Solorzano, K.

If your author is a group or organization, you'll write out the full name on the reference list. You want to use the most specific group, business, or agency that had a hand in creating the work you are citing, as opposed to parent organizations.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The parent organization for the CDC would be the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and you wouldn't list it as an author.

If your source is a film or TV series, you may include the director, writer, or executive producer as the author, though this should be specified in parentheses after the name.

Spielberg, S. (Director).

Date

You want to be as specific as possible for dates, and you would write them in a specific way.

(2020)
(2020, July 28)
(2020, Fall)

Your date would immediately follow the author in a reference list entry.

Borry, E. L. (2020, May).

You wouldn't use the copyright date for a website (typically found at the bottom of the webpage or site) for APA style citing. If you can't find a date, you'll write (n.d.) for "no date" after the author's name.

Wikramanayake, E. (n.d.).

Title

APA style breaks titles up into two groups: stand-alone works and those that are a contained within something larger. Stand-alone works include books, government reports, films, online videos, webpages, and data sets. Works that are considered contained within a larger work include articles in newspapers, magazines, and journals (even if the articles are found online), as well as chapters or essays in anthologies and episode titles of TV series and podcasts. Stand-alone words are written in italics, while works contained in something else are written on the reference page without italics or quotation marks.

All titles within this section of a reference entry are written in what is called "sentence case." This means you write it like a sentence and only capitalize proper nouns and words that start the title or subtitle. It's very similar to writing a sentence, so focus on representing the title that way.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2020, October 15). International cooperation.

Erwin, N. Z. (2022, May 12). First female aviator receives Kolligian Trophy.

Spires, D. N., Eckert, R. S., Sturdevant, R. W., & Bradley, G. W. (1998). Beyond horizons : A half century of Air Force space leadership.

Overton, M. R. (2015, November/December). Purposeful development of the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for space cadre.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2021, September 10). Priming NASA's Artemis I for launch to the Moon [Video].

The first two examples above showcase webpage titles, while the third is an ebook. You can see that the titles are written in italics. The fourth example is for a scholarly journal article, so the title isn't written in italics. The final example is a YouTube video, and a bracketed description is added as part of the title. These brackets are used to further define works outside of print like videos, films, TV series episodes, photos, data sets, and social media posts. They should be short and direct, and you can see some examples of what they'd look like below.

Herzog, W. (Director). (2005). Grizzly man [Film].

BBC Earth. (2021, July 24). The deadly Portuguese man o' war | Blue planet II [Video].

You'll do this for audiobooks as well, but only if you quote from them.

Source

The source section can contain many different elements. Some common ones include names of editors, publishers, translators, periodicals, databases, and archives, as well as DOIs, URLs, and volume, issue, and page numbers. These pieces of information can be organized and formatted differently depending on whether it's a book, video, article, or some other form of media. For that reason, we'll cover how to cite some of the most commonly used research materials in the sections below.

Common Reference Entry Types

Scholarly Journals

Scholarly journal articles make for some of the best sources to cite in a research paper due to the their content and the strict fact-checking requirements needed for publication. Authors of scholarly journal articles are researchers with graduate degrees, and so are the people evaluating their articles for accuracy. These are also some of the most difficult to cite because of all the different pieces of information included in the "Sources" section of each entry. Below is an example of a scholarly journal reference entry with the "Source" section underlined.

Caron, R. M. (2020, October/December). The U.S. refugee resettlement conundrum. Peace Review, 32(4), 527–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2020.1921416

Focus on the "Source" section:

Peace Review, 32(4), 527–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402659.2020.1921416

There are four elements within this section: the title of the journal, the volume and issue, the page range, and the DOI or URL if you got the source online.

Peace Review is the title of the journal. Periodical (newspapers, magazines, and journals that come out periodically) titles are written in italics in APA style. It's followed by a comma.
The numbers 32(4) show the volume and issue that you used. The volume number is written in italics, and it is connected to the issue number in parentheses with no space between them. These numbers are also followed by a comma.
The numbers 527-535 show the range of pages where the article can be found within the journal. The page range is followed by a period.
If your source was retrieved online, give the DOI (digital object identifier) if you have one. It can often be found when you click on the title of the source from your library search page. If you don't see it on that list of information where you see "Authors," "Document Type," and "Abstract," then you can skip that piece of info in your reference entry. You can also include the URL (web address) if you can't find the DOI, but not if you are using a database that requires a login like EBSCOhost. The reason you wouldn't provide that web address is because it would lead to a login page and not to the source you used.

Below is another example with multiple authors.

Poliak, M., Baker, A., Konecny, V., & Nica, E. (2020). Regulatory and governance mechanisms for self driving cars: Social equity benefits and machine learning-based ethical judgments. Contemporary Readings in Law & Social Justice, 12(1), 58–64. https://doi.org/10.22381/CRLSJ12120208Links to an external site.

Note: Pay close attention to the use of capitalization and italics for the different pieces of information for the different examples!!! Some titles are capitalized and some are italicized depending on the type of source you are citing (books, web pages, videos, articles, etc.).

Newspapers and Magazines

Newspapers and magazines are cited much like scholarly journal articles. One major difference is that volume and issue numbers are less common when getting a newspaper or magazine article online.

Olsen, J. M. (2022, May 18). 4 EU nations to harness North Sea wind for green transition. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-05-18/eu-nations-to-harness-north-sea-wind

Maddalena, S. (2022, May 14). A children’s hospital in wartime. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/14/ukraine-war-children-hospital/

As you can see in the examples, it is also more common to provide a specific day and month beside the year for newspapers and magazine articles because they'll often include them near where they list the title and author.

Webpages

Webpages are considered "standalone works" in APA style. This means that if you are citing a webpage, you italicize the webpage title in the "Title" section and not italicize the title of the website. This can be tricky for news sites that appear similar to online newspapers, as the place where you use italics on the title is flipped around. You can see it in the underlined sections in the examples below.

Online newspaper:

Ham, A. (2022, May 7). We've been drawing these saber-tooth cats all wrong. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/science/saber-tooth-cats-teeth.html

Online news site:

Strickland, A. (2022, May 18). Tiny Amazon fish spotted in a single stream could go extinct just after being found. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/18/world/amazon-new-fish-species-scn/index.html

If it has a version that exists in print, treat it like a newspaper, magazine, or journal. If it doesn't (websites for TV news networks like CNN or FOX News won't have print articles), then treat it like a webpage.

If your webpage doesn't have a date, put (n.d.) in the "Date" section.

Royal Society of Chemistry. (n.d.). Magnesium. Periodic Table. https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/12/magnesium

If your website title is the same as the organization you are using as an author, skip the part where you give it again in the "Source" section. This prevents unnecessary repetition.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2022, February). Challenges in calculating occupational fatality rates. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2022/article/challenges-in-calculating-occupational-fatality-rates.htm

Books

Books are fairly easy to represent in a reference list. The publisher of the book is included in the "Source" section followed by the DOI you used if it is an online instead of a print version. Just like with scholarly journals, you'll only include the URL in place of the DOI if your source isn't from a database that requires a login.

Wilkerson, I. (2020) Caste: The origins of our discontent. Random House.

Branson, S. (2021). Scientific Americans: Invention, technology, and national identity. Cornell University Press.

Older works that have been republished should include the original publication date in parentheses at the end of the reference: (Original work published XXXX)

Freud, S. (1919). A young girl's diary (E. Paul & C. Paul, Trans.). Generic NL Freebook Publisher. (Original work published 1919)

In the above example, you can see how translators would be included as well, and below you can see how a work with multiple editions would be written.

Hannigan, J. A. (2006). Environmental sociology (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis.

Short Story or Essay Collections and Anthologies

This section refers to books that contain collections of essays or short stories, basically anything that exists as a collection of works by different authors in a single book. They are cited very similarly to books, and we are including them in this DLA because they are a very common form of textbook in college.

Knight, E. (2006). The bones of my father. In A. Rampersad & H. Herbold (Eds.), The Oxford anthology of African-American poetry (pp. 77-78), Oxford University Press.

The difference is that you include any editors of the collection, here given as "In A. Rampersad & H. Herbold (Eds.), and you'll provide both the title of the essay or short story as well as the title of the whole collection. Note that page numbers are represented differently than with scholarly journal articles.

You'll capitalize all book titles using sentence case in the reference list (i.e. The Oxford anthology of African-American poetry instead of The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry).

Films and Online Videos

When citing films in a reference list, the director is typically put in the "Author" section. You'll specify that it is a director in parentheses after the name.

Neville, N. (Director). (2018). Won't you be my neighbor? [Film]. Tremolo Productions; Impact Partners; Independent Lens.

You'll specify the format, in this case [Film], in brackets after the title. The production companies will follow after that.

Online videos require the website and DOI or web address where you found the video, and these are included at the end of the reference. You use the format specificity [Video], but the rest of it the way is similar to how you'd cite a web page.

The White House. (2022, June 15). President Biden deliver remarks to celebrate pride month [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrhX4KEIz54

National Film Board of Canada. (2018, September 14). Skin for skin [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/289877327