Transcript for:
Guide to APA Referencing Style

Your list of references should start on a new page, after the main body of your writing. It should contain full details for every source you refer to in your in-text citations. It must be in alphabetical order, according to the author's surname, and use hanging indents.

This makes it easy for your reader to find each source you mentioned earlier in your writing. You'll notice all of the references listed have certain parts in common, such as the author's surname, initial, an ampersand to show the last author in the list, the year of publication in brackets, followed by a full stop and the title shown in italics. The APA style uses full stops to separate out the different elements of a reference.

Different types of sources require slightly different specific information to be included in the reference list, so let's look at two examples. First, Referencing a journal article. As normal, provide the author's surname and initials.

The year of the publication goes in brackets followed by a full stop. Next is the title of the article, the title of the journal in italics, the volume number in italics, issue number in brackets, page numbers and finally the DOI link. What about referencing a book? You need to give the author's surname, initial, year of publication.

the title in italics, the edition number and the name of the publisher. If the book or e-book you used has a DOI number, include this at the end. You can see from our example list here sources such as web pages, reports, chapters and edited collections, and other types of sources you reference all have slightly different requirements, so you will need to use the APA 7th edition style guide or library website to help ensure you reference these correctly. If you need any further help with referencing, speak to your tutor or visit the library website.