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RISE Article Research & APA Boot Camp: APA Step By Step Citation Building

SAVE THIS GUIDE AS IT IS THE LINKING SOURCE FOR APA CITATION BUILDING

Sample Reference List

See how your Reference page should look!

Step One - Authors

APA citations always start with authors. Follow the format below, regardless of type of source (article, web page, etc)

  • Invert all individual authors’ names, providing the surname first, followed by a comma and the author’s initials.
  • Use the first and middle initials if they are listed in the source. If only the first name is given in the source, just use the first initial (you do not need to go out and try to find the middle initial).
  • Put one space between period after the first initial and second initial (if you have a second initial).

One author:

  • Author, A. A.
  • Gomez, P.

Two authors
Comma and ampersand (&) after the first author

  • Author, A. A., & Author, B. B.
  • Gomez, P., & Patel, M. C.

Three - Twenty authors
Surnames and initials for up to and including 20 authors. When there are two to 20 authors, use an ampersand before the final author’s name.

  • Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C.
  • Gomez, P., Patel, M. C., Jones, A. B., & Sanchez, B.

Twenty-one and more authors:
When there are 21 or more authors, include the first 19 authors’ names, insert an ellipsis (but no ampersand), and then add the final author’s name.

  • Author, A. A., Author, B. B., Author, C. C., Author, D. D., Author, E. E., Author, F. F., Author, G. G., Author, H. H., Author, I. I., Author, J. J., Author, K. K., Author, L. L., Author, M. M., Author, N. N., Author, O. O., Author, P. P., Author, Q. Q., Author, R. R., Author, S. S., . . . Author, Z. Z.

Author with a suffix:

  • Do not include degrees such as MD, PhD, etc
  • If an author is indicated as a Junior or Senior follow this format:
    • Author, A., Jr., & Author, B.

Group authors can include corporations, government agencies, organizations, etc; and a group may publish in coordination with individuals. Here, you simply treat the publishing organization the same way you'd treat the author's name and format the rest of the citation as normal. Be sure to give the full name of the group author in your reference list, although abbreviations may be used in your text.

Entries in reference works ( e.g. dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias) without credited authors are also considered works with group authors.

Examples:
  • American Library Association
  • Ford Motor Company

Note: For a government agency, use the Government Agency as Author guidelines.

Government agency as author will most often occur if you are using a web page.

  • The specific agency responsible for the report appears as the author.
  • The names of parent agencies not present in the group author name appear in the source element as the publisher.
    • If you are unsure of what the parent agency(ies) are, stop in the IRC to see me or send me an email: cjames-jenkin@imsa.edu. 
  • This creates concise in-text citations and complete reference list entries.

National Cancer Institute. (2019). Taking time: Support for people with cancer. U.S. Department of Health and

Human Services, National Institutes of Health. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/patient-education/takingtime.pdf

For a missing author, do not use “Anonymous” as the author unless the work is actually signed “Anonymous.” If the work is signed “Anonymous,” use “Anonymous” in the reference and in-text citation.

If your source doesn't have an author name, but is considered a "group author" (this may be a corporation or organization name, for example), use that company or organization name.

Contact Ms. James-Jenkin for more assistance.

Step Two - Type of Source

Most of your citations should be from scholarly, peer-reviewed articles.

They will have the following components:

  • Author(s)
  • Year of publication
  • Article title (Only the first word of the article title uses a capital letter - unless it is a proper noun, acronym, or after a colon/dash)
  • Journal title (Put in italics. All words except the, an, and are in capital letters)
  • Volume number (you can often find this)
  • Issue number (you can sometimes find this)
  • Page numbers (you can sometimes find this) **not needed if there is an article number
  • Article number (you can often find this) **takes presidence over page numbers
  • DOI (digital object identifier) (you can usually find this)

Follow the author formatting shown above in the Author box. Cite the rest of the article, using the information types listed above. Use the italics, periods, and commas as shown in the example below.

With an article number:
(Year of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal, Volume number(Issue number), Article number. DOI

With page numbers:

(Year of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal, Volume number(Issue number), Page numbers. DOI

Examples:

With page numbers and no DOI:
Cao, Y., Jiang, Z., Alexander, B., Cole-Dai, J., Savarino, J., Erbland, J., & Geng, L. (2022). On the potential fingerprint of the Antarctic ozone hole

in ice-core nitrate isotopes: A case study based on a South Pole ice core. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 22(20), 13407-13422.

With article number and DOI:

Jerrentrup, A., Mueller, T., Glowalla, U., Herder, M., Henrichs, N., Neubauer, A., & Schaefer, J. R. (2018). Teaching medicine with the help of “Dr.

House.” PLoS ONE, 13(3), Article e0193972. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193972

Authors of Chapter. (Year). Chapter title. In S. Smith, A. Gomez, & P. Kumar (Eds.), Book title (pp. 10-22). Publisher. DOI (or URL)

  • Authors of the chapter are first
  • The editors of the entire volume are listed first initial, last name
  • If there is just one editor it would be formatted: A. Gomez (Ed.),

This is for whole books written by one (or more) authors. It is NOT for books that are edited and individual chapters each have different authors. For that, see e-book chapters tab.

  • Author(s) in normal author format (see Step 1)
  • Year in parentheses
  • Title of book in italics (only capitalize the first letter of the title & the first word of a subtitle. Do capitalize any acronyms or proper nouns
  • Edition in parentheses (if there is an edition)
  • Publisher
  • DOI or persistent link (if available)
  • Follow punctuation in the examples below.
  • Print and ebooks follow the same format
    • If you used an ebook from a library database (example: Ebsco, Science Direct), DO NOT include the database name in the citation
    • Do include a DOI or persistent link for an ebook if available

Author, A. (year). Title of the book: With a subtitle. Publisher. DOI

Prothero, D. (2007). Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters. Columbia University. 

Alberts, B., Heald, R., Johnson, A., Morgan, D., Raff, M., Roberts, K., & Walter, P. (2022). Molecular biology of the cell (7th ed.). W. W. Norton. 

Palanikumar, K. (2024). Machine intelligence in mechanical engineering. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/C2022-0-00430-X

Conference proceeding formats will vary by the format in which the conference proceedings were published.

The most common are as a journal article and as a chapter in an ebook.

Contact Ms. James-Jenkin for help in deciphering which type of source you've got.

For a paper presented but not published in a journal or book:

Author, A. A. (Date). Title of Contribution [Type of contribution]. Conference Name, Location. DOI or URL if applicable

Bland, A. (2017, November). The implementation of a junior Samoan language programme in a South Island, New Zealand secondary school     
          context [Paper presentation]. Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Conference 2017, Canberra,     
          Australia. https://bit.ly/37DvrHR

Magazine articles are written for the general public (as opposed to scholarly articles which are written for professionals in the field).
Magazine articles are generally written by journalists or other general writers.
They may be in print or on the magazine's website.

  • Author in standard APA author format
  • Date of publication: (year, Month Day).
  • Article title with only first word capitilized (unless an acronym, proper noun, or first word of a subtitle)
  • Title of magazine in italics. All important words are capitalized
  • Volume, issue, and page numbers if available. If they are not given (as with many online magazine articles) just omit them
  • Include DOI if given (rare for a magazine article). If there is no DOI, use the URL.
  • If the magazine article was retreived from a research database (Ebsco, ProQuest, etc) DO NOT INCLUDE THE DATABASE name.
     

Schaefer, N. K., & Shapiro, B. (2019, September 6). New middle chapter in the story of human evolution. Science, 365(6457), 981–982.

     https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay3550

 

For more information:

Whang, O. (2022, June 22). The many uses of CRISPR: A scientist tells all. The New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/27/science/crispr-science-medical-research.html?searchResultPosition=4

 

  • If the website has a corresponding print edition (like a newspaper or a print magazine), the title of the newspaper or magazine is in italics.
  • Include the date and month of the newspaper or magazine (if given).
  • Title of article only has the first letter in caps unless an acronym, proper noun, or a subtitle after a colon or dash

Pre-print articles may or may not have completed the peer-review process.

There are many sources for pre-print articles, including, but not limited to:

  • PsyArXiv
  • ChemRxiv
  • bioRxiv
  • arXiv
  • PeerJ
  • Some articles on PubMed
  • Some articles on Google Scholar

In pre-prints, the article title is in italics. The source of the pre-print is not.

Because they are pre-prints, there is no journal tile, no volume/issue numbers, no page or article numbers.

Example:

Hampton, S., Rabagliati, H., Sorace, A., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2017). Autism and bilingualism: A qualitative interview study of parents’ perspectives and experiences. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/76xfs

If you have an older pre-print article, check to see if it was ever published through the peer-review process. Finalized, published articles should always be used if available. Contact Ms. James-Jenkin for help.

StatPearls is a tertiary source for medical information. You can think of it like a peer-reviewed Wikipedia article for health care. It is good for overviews of medical topics.

  • It does not have DOI numbers so you will use the URL instead.
  • Because StatPearls is regularly updated, it important to note the date you retrieved the article.


Gerriets, V., Anderson, J., & Nappe, T. M. (2021). Acetaminophen. In StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing. Retrieved April 4, 2023 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482369/

 

 

Format:

Author in standard author format. (Year). Title of the dissertation (Publication no. ) [Type of Dissertation, University Name]. Source of Dissertation. URL

  • Type of dissertation may be a Doctoral dissertation or a Master's thesis.
  • Source of dissertation may be a commercial product like ProQuest Dissertations or it may be in a University's depository like the University of Illinois IDEALS repository.
  • Follow the ( ) or [ ] exactly as shown in the 2 examples here

Example:

Zambrano-Vazquez, L. (2016). The interaction of state and trait worry on response monitoring in those with worry and obsessive-compulsive

symptoms [Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona]. UA Campus Repository. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/620615

Icahn School of Medicine. (2023). Hemoglobin. Mount Sinai. https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/tests/hemoglobin

  • You normally do not need to put retrieval dates, only when pages are designed to change over time (like Wikipedia or Statpearls).
  • Title of the webpage is in italics - follow standard title format putting only the first letter in capital letter unless an acronym, proper noun, or a subtitle after a colon or dash

Do not create references or in-text citations for whole websites.

  • Wikipedia should not be a first choice source. Check with Ms. James-Jenkin for finding academic alternatives to Wikipedia
  • Date in ( ) should be the date the page was last edited (look at the very bottom of the page)
  • Retrieved date is the date you read the article
  • Because Wikipedia is regularly updated, it important to note the date you retrieved the article.

CRISPR. (2023, May 22). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 1, 2023 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR