how to bibliography apa style

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How to Write a Bibliography in APA Format

Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author and educational consultant focused on helping students learn about psychology.

how to bibliography apa style

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

how to bibliography apa style

Sample Bibliography

What is an apa format bibliography.

An APA format bibliography is an alphabetical listing of all sources that might be used to write an academic paper, essay, article, or research paper—particularly work that is covering psychology or psychology-related topics. APA format is the official style of the American Psychological Association (APA). This format is used by many psychology professors, students, and researchers.

Even if it is not a required part of your assignment, writing a bibliography can help you keep track of your sources and make it much easier to create your final reference page in proper APA format.

Creating an APA Bibliography

A bibliography is similar in many ways to a reference section , but there are some important differences. While a reference section includes every source that was actually used in your paper, a bibliography may include sources that you considered using but may have dismissed because they were irrelevant or outdated.

Bibliographies can be a great way to keep track of information you might want to use in your paper and to organize the information that you find in different sources. The following are four steps you can follow to create your APA format bibliography.

Start on a New Page

Your working bibliography should be kept separate from the rest of your paper. Start it on a new page, with the title “Bibliography” centered at the top and in bold text. Some people use the title "References" instead, so it's best to check with your professor or instructor which they prefer you use.

Gather Your Sources

Compile all the sources you might possibly use in your paper. While you might not use all of these sources in your paper, having a complete list will make it easier later on when you prepare your reference section.

Gathering your sources can be particularly helpful when outlining and writing your paper.

By quickly glancing through your working bibliography, you will be able to get a better idea of which sources will be the most appropriate to support your thesis and main points.

Reference Each Source

Your references should be listed alphabetically by the author’s last name, and they should be double-spaced. The first line of each reference should be flush left, while each additional line of a single reference should be a few spaces to the right of the left margin, which is known as a hanging indent.

The format of each source is as follows for academic journals:

The following examples are scholarly articles in academic journals, cited in APA format:

Visit the American Psychological Association's website for more information on citing other types of sources including online media, audiovisual media, and more.

Create an Annotation for Each Source

Normally a bibliography contains only references' information, but in some cases you might decide to create an annotated bibliography. An annotation is a summary or evaluation of the source.

An annotation is a brief description of approximately 150 words describing the information in the source, your evaluation of its credibility, and how it pertains to your topic. Writing one of these for each piece of research will make your writing process faster and easier.

This step helpful in determining which sources to ultimately use in your paper. Your instructor may also require it as part of the assignment so they can assess your thought process and understanding of your topic.

Reasons to Write a Bibliography

One of the biggest reasons to create an APA format bibliography is simply to make the research and writing process easier.

If you do not have a comprehensive list of all of your references, you might find yourself scrambling to figure out where you found certain bits of information that you included in your paper.

A bibliography is also an important tool that your readers can use to access your sources.

While writing an annotated bibliography might not be required for your assignment, it can be a very useful step. The process of writing an annotation helps you learn more about your topic, develop a deeper understanding of the subject, and become better at evaluating various sources of information.

The following is an example of an APA format bibliography by the website EasyBib:

There are many online resources that demonstrate different formats of bibliographies, including the American Psychological Association website . Purdue University's Online Writing Lab also has examples of formatting an APA format bibliography. Check out this video on their YouTube channel which provides detailed instructions on formatting an APA style bibliography in Microsoft Word.

You can check out the Purdue site for more information on writing an annotated APA bibliography as well.

A Word From Verywell

If you are taking a psychology class, you may be asked at some point to create a bibliography as part of the research paper writing process. Even if your instructor does not expressly require a bibliography, creating one can be a useful way to help structure your research and make the writing process easier.

For psychology majors , it can be helpful to save any bibliographies you have written over the course of your studies so that you can refer back to them later when studying for exams or writing papers for other psychology courses.

Masic I. The importance of proper citation of references in biomedical articles. Acta Inform Med . 2013;21(3):148–155. doi:10.5455/aim.2013.21.148-155

Cornell University Library. How to prepare an annotated bibliography: The annotated bibliography .

American Psychological Association. How do you format a bibliography in APA Style?

American Psychological Association. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . 7th Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; 2020.

By Kendra Cherry Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author and educational consultant focused on helping students learn about psychology.

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How do you format a bibliography in APA Style ® ?

how to bibliography apa style

Go to 7th edition guidelines

APA Style ® calls for a list of references instead of a bibliography.

The requirements of a reference list are that all references cited in the text of a paper must be listed alphabetically by first author's last name in the list of references and that all references listed must be cited within the text.

A bibliography, however, typically includes resources in addition to those cited in the text and may include annotated descriptions of the items listed.

In general, the list of references is double-spaced and listed alphabetically by first author's last name. For each reference, the first line is typed flush with the left margin, and any additional lines are indented as a group a few spaces to the right of the left margin (this is called a hanging indent ).

APA Publications and Communications Board Working Group on Journal Article Reporting Standards. (2009). Reporting standards for research in psychology: Why do we need them? What might they be? American Psychologist, 63 , 839–851. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.63.9.839

APA Style Contacts

Writing a Bibliography: APA Format

Below are standard formats and examples for basic bibliographic information recommended by the American Psychological Association (APA). For more information on the APA format, see http://www.apastyle.org .

Your list of works cited should begin at the end of the paper on a new page with the centered title, References . Alphabetize the entries in your list by the author's last name, using the letter-by-letter system (ignore spaces and other punctuation.) Only the initials of the first and middle names are given. If the author's name is unknown, alphabetize by the title, ignoring any A, An , or The .

For dates, spell out the names of months in the text of your paper, but abbreviate them in the list 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 be consistent. With 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 no way to print italics. If you write a bibliography by hand, you should still underline the names of publications. But, if you use a computer, then publication names should be in italics as they are below. Always check with your instructor regarding their preference of using italics or underlining. Our examples use italics.

Hanging Indentation

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

Capitalization, Abbreviation, and Punctuation

The APA guidelines specify using sentence-style capitalization for 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 periodical titles and proper names in a title which should still be capitalized. The periodical title is run in title case, and is followed by the volume number which, with the title, is also italicized.

If there is more than one author, use an ampersand (&) before the name of the last author. If there are more than six authors, list only the first one and use et al . for the rest.

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

Format Examples

Allen, T. (1974). Vanishing wildlife of North America . Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society.

Boorstin, D. (1992). The creators: A history of the heroes of the 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 new encyclopedia britannica (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 Library Publishing.

Magazine & Newspaper Articles

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

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

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

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

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

Website or Webpage

Online document: Author's name. (Date of publication). Title of work . Retrieved month day, year, from full URL Note: When citing Internet sources, refer to the specific 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 check your references to online documents. There is no period following a URL. Note: If you cannot find some of this information, cite what is available.

Devitt, T. (2001, August 2). 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 that for a university or a government agency), identify the host organization and the relevant program or department before giving the URL for the document itself. Precede the URL with a colon.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2000, March 7). Cultivating positive emotions to optimize health and well-being. Prevention & Treatment , 3, Article 0001a. Retrieved November 20, 2000, from http://journals.apa.org/prevention/volume3/pre0030001a.html

GVU's 8th WWW user survey . (n.d.). Retrieved August 8, 2000, from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/usersurveys/survey1997-10/

Health Canada. (2002, February). The safety of genetically modified food crops . Retrieved March 22, 2005, from http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/protection/biologics_genetics/gen_mod_foods/genmodebk.html

Hilts, P. J. (1999, February 16). In forecasting their emotions, most people flunk out. New York Times . Retrieved November 21, 2000, from http://www.nytimes.com

APA Formatted Example Bibliography

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how to bibliography apa style

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Citation Styles: A Brief Guide to APA, MLA and Turabian

Sample bibliography: apa.

The basic format for a book citation requires listing the author's name, the title of the book, the publisher's name, and the date of publication. Edited books, when cited in full, will list the editor's name instead of an author’s name.

Becsey, L., Wachsberger, P., Samuels, S., et al (Directors). (2008). In the valley of Elah . [DVD]. Warner Home Video.

Ginsberg, J. P., Ayers, E., Burriss, L., & Powell, D. A. (2008). Discriminative delay Pavlovian eye-blink conditioning in veterans with and without post-traumatic stress disorder. Journal of Anxiety Disorders , 22 , 809-823. https://doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2007.08.009

Glantz, A. (2009). The war comes home: Washington's battle against America's veterans . University of California Press.

Jakupcak, M., Luterek, J., Hunt, S., Conybeare, D., & McFall, M. (2008). Post-traumatic stress and its relationship to physical health functioning in a sample of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans seeking post-deployment VA health care. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease , 196 , 425-428.

Jensen, G. & Wiest, A. A. (2001). War in the age of technology myriad faces of modern armed conflict . New York University Press.

Killgore, W. D. S., Cotting, D. I., Thomas, J. L., Cox, A. L., McGurk, D., Vo, A. H., et al. (2008). Post-combat invincibility: Violent combat experiences are associated with increased risk-taking propensity following deployment. Journal of Psychiatric Research , 42 (13), 1112-1121. https://doi:10.1016/j.jpsychires.2008.01.001

Monson, C. M., Fredman, S. J., & Adair, K. C. (2008). Cognitive-behavioral conjoint therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder: Application to operation enduring and Iraqi freedom veterans. Journal of Clinical Psychology , 64 , 958-971. https://doi:10.1002/jclp.20511

Paulson, D. S., & Krippner, S. (2007). Haunted by combat : Understanding PTSD in war veterans including women, reservists, and those coming back from Iraq . Praeger Security International.

Tanielian, T. L., Jaycox, L., & Rand Corporation. (2008). Invisible wounds of war: Psychological and cognitive injuries, their consequences, and services to assist recovery . Rand.

United States. Congress. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. (2007). Working in a war zone: Post traumatic stress disorder in civilians returning from Iraq . G.P.O.

Van Winkle, C. (2009). Soft spots: A marine's memoir of combat and post-traumatic stress disorder . St. Martin's Press.

Purdue Online Writing Lab College of Liberal Arts

how to bibliography apa style

Reference List: Basic Rules

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Note: This page reflects the latest version of the APA Publication Manual (i.e., APA 7), which released in October 2019. The equivalent resource for the older APA 6 style can be found here .

This resource, revised according to the 7 th edition APA Publication Manual, provides fundamental guidelines for constructing the reference pages of research papers. For more information, please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , (7 th ed.).

This page gives basic guidelines for formatting the reference list at the end of a standard APA research paper. Most sources follow fairly straightforward rules. However, because sources obtained from academic journals carry special weight in research writing, these sources are subject to special rules . Thus, this page presents basic guidelines for citing academic journals separate from its "ordinary" basic guidelines. This distinction is made clear below.

Note: Because the information on this page pertains to virtually all citations, we've highlighted one important difference between APA 6 and APA 7 with an underlined note written in red.

Formatting a Reference List

Your reference list should appear at the end of your paper. It provides the information necessary for a reader to locate and retrieve any source you cite in the body of the paper. Each source you cite in the paper must appear in your reference list; likewise, each entry in the reference list must be cited in your text.

Your references should begin on a new page separate from the text of the essay; label this page "References" in bold, centered at the top of the page (do NOT underline or use quotation marks for the title). All text should be double-spaced just like the rest of your essay.

Basic Rules for Most Sources

Basic Rules for Articles in Academic Journals

Please note: While the APA manual provides examples of how to cite common types of sources, it does not cover all conceivable sources. If you must cite a source that APA does not address, the APA suggests finding an example that is similar to your source and using that format. For more information, see page 282 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , 7 th ed.

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Setting Up the APA Reference Page | Formatting & References (Examples)

Published on November 4, 2020 by Raimo Streefkerk . Revised on August 23, 2022.

APA reference page (7th edition)

On the APA reference page, you list all the sources that you’ve cited in your paper. The list starts on a new page right after the body text.

Follow these instructions to set up your APA reference page:

Generate accurate APA citations with Scribbr

Table of contents, setting up the apa reference page, apa alphabetization guidelines, which sources to include on the reference page, annotated bibliography, creating apa references.

References are ordered alphabetically by the first author’s last name. If the author is unknown, order the reference entry by the first meaningful word of the title (ignoring articles: “the”, “a”, or “an”).

Word processors like Word or Google Docs and citation generators can usually order the reference list automatically. However, ordering becomes challenging when citing multiple works by the same author or works by authors with the same last name.

Our in-depth article on ordering references in APA Style explains what to do in these situations.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Only include references for sources cited in the body text (with an APA in-text citation ). Don’t include references for:

For some student papers, it’s common to describe or evaluate the source in an annotation . These annotations are placed on a new line below the corresponding reference entry. The entire annotation is indented 0.5 inches.

If an annotation consists of multiple paragraphs, the first line of the second and any subsequent paragraphs is indented an additional 0.5 inches.

APA annotated bibliography (7th edition)

The format of an APA reference differs depending on the source type. Play around with the options in the Scribbr Example Generator to get familiar with APA Style.

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With Scribbr’s free APA citation generator you can easily cite your sources according to the new 7th edition guidelines. It’s accurate, fast, and easy to use. Give it a try!

APA Citation Generator

APA citation examples

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Streefkerk, R. (2022, August 23). Setting Up the APA Reference Page | Formatting & References (Examples). Scribbr. Retrieved March 6, 2023, from https://www.scribbr.com/apa-style/apa-reference-page/

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how to bibliography apa style

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How to Cite Using APA Style (6th ed.): Books
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APA WORKSHOP (PART 1)
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COMMENTS

How to Write an APA Format Bibliography
Reference Each Source · Last name of first author (followed by their first initial) · The year the source was published in parentheses · The title
How to Write an APA Bibliography
APA 7 style guidelines require a reference list of all the sources you included in your research paper. APA references follow the author-date style of
How do you format a bibliography in APA Style? (6th edition)
The requirements of a reference list are that all references cited in the text of a paper must be listed alphabetically by first author's last name in the list
How to Write a Bibliography in APA Format with Examples
Format: Author's last name, first initial. (Publication date). Article title. Periodical title, volume number(issue number if available), inclusive pages
Citation Styles: A Brief Guide to APA, MLA and Turabian
Sample Bibliography: APA ... The basic format for a book citation requires listing the author's name, the title of the book, the publisher's name
Creating an APA Format Annotated Bibliography
Key moments. View all · start with the title of our work at the top center · start with the title of our work at the top center · start with the
How to Add an APA Style Bibliography in Microsoft Word
This tutorial will explain how to design and manage a custom APA style bibliography utilizing the automated tools in Microsoft Word.
General Format
General APA Guidelines ... Your essay should be typed and double-spaced on standard-sized paper (8.5" x 11"), with 1" margins on all sides. Include a page header
Reference List: Basic Rules
Give the last name and first/middle initials for all authors of a particular work up to and including 20 authors (this is a new rule, as APA 6 only required the
Setting Up the APA Reference Page
Place the section label “References” in bold at the top of the page (centered). · Order the references alphabetically. · Double-space all text.