APA Style

At the end of a research paper, APA format requires a separate page that alphabetically lists all of the sources that you quoted, paraphrased, or summarized. Every source listed on the References page should correspond to one of your in-text citations. 

Citing sources gives credit back to the original author when you use someone else's words and ideas in your research paper.  The research process requires background information to develop the vocabulary, data, and details (who, what, where, why, and how) about your topic, so sometimes there are sources that you learned from but did not actually use in your writing. These sources do not go on your References page. Only sources that were quoted, paraphrased, or summarized should be on your References page.

Details on References: 

• References should start on a separate from the rest of the paper with the page numbers continuing from the rest of the paper. 
• Center and bold the word, References, at the top of the page. Do not italicize or use quotation marks around it. 
• The entire References page should be double spaced without extra space between citation entries. 
• All entries should be in alphabetical order.
• Any second and subsequent lines should have a hanging indentation of 0.5 inches. 
• All author names should be inverted with only initials for the first and middle name. Ex: Morgan, J. P. 
• Titles of books, articles, webpages, and more (excluding the title of academic journal) should only have the first word of the title and subtitle capitalized. 
• The title of academic journals should be italicized, maintaining any nonstandard capitalization or punctuation (Ex: EBSCOHost), with every major word capitalized.
• Italicize the title of books, webpages, and audiovisual sources. 
• Do not put a period after URLs or DOIs.

There are four general elements on the Reference page and each answers a specific question about the source

• Author: who is responsible for this work?
• Date: when was this work created?
• Title: what is this work called?
• Source: where can I locate this work?

Knowing the guiding questions, writers can create references for any type of source even when they are unable to find an exact example.