APA Reference Sheet (7th Edition)

NC State Undergraduate Writing Center ∗ NC State Graduate Writing Center

go.ncsu.edu/uwcenter ∗ 919.515.3163 ∗ go.ncsu.edu/gwc

APA Citation Style

APA citation style is primarily used in the social and behavioral sciences such as psychology, economics,
political science, anthropology, etc. What makes APA style unique from other citation styles is that there is
greater emphasis on publication date. The date is placed prominently in the in-text citation and listed
immediately after the author’s name on the reference list.

In the fields where APA style is used, research is constantly evolving, meaning when the research was
published is very important, sometimes more important than what it says. For example, if you were
writing a paper about computers, you would find very different information if you used material from 20
years ago versus within the last 5 years. Other styles that place less emphasis on dates, such as MLA, find
that classic texts, like Jane Eyre, or contemporary texts, like Harry Potter, won’t change even hundreds of
years after their initial publication.

Additionally, APA style is used to reference and document sources to provide proper credit and attribution
to original authors and their works. Academic work is seen as ownership, much like owning a car. If you
were to borrow a car you would have to ask for permission or give credit to the car owner. Using APA style
allows you to offer credit, avoiding pitfalls such as plagiarism and academic dishonesty. This reference
sheet will provide an overview of the reference list and in-text citations. For more complete information, be
sure to examine the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition.

Common Reference Entries for Print Sources

Books
Book with One Author
Last Name, First Initial. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Publisher.
Scigliano, E. (2002). Love, war, and circuses: The age-old relationship between elephants and humans.
Houghton Mifflin.

Book with Two to Twenty Authors

List all authors by last name and first initial in the order in which they appear. Each author’s name should
be separated by a comma. The last author’s name should have an ampersand (&) before it.
Skott-Myhre, K., Weima, K., & Gibbs, H. (2012). Writing the family: Women, auto-ethnography, and
family work. Sense Publishers.

Book with Twenty or More Authors

When you have twenty or more authors, list the first 19 authors’ names. Then include an ellipsis in place
of the remaining authors. You will end the authors by listing the final name without an ampersand. You
will never have more than 20 names in a reference citation.
Targaryen, D., Snow, J., Stark, A., Clegane, G., Lannister, C., Lannister, T., Stark, S., Stark, E., Drogo,
K., Baratheon, J., Clegane, S., Greyjoy, T., Baelish, P., Lannister, J., Bolton, R., Martell, O.,
Stark, B., Tyrell, M., Stark, R.,…Varys, L. (2019). Game of Thrones rocks: A story of Game of
Thrones’ rocks. Same Center Publishing.
Book with No Author or Editor
List the title of the book before the year. Only use “Anonymous” if the author is listed as “Anonymous.”
New American Standard Bible. (1997). Foundation Press.

Chapter in an Edited Collection

Author of chapter. (Year of publication). Title of chapter. In Name(s) of editor(s) (Eds.). Title of book
(edition (ed.), page numbers) Publisher.
Fahy, K. (2016). One topic, different rhetoric. In D. Gierdowski, P. Colby, C. Krieg, W. Lloyd, & M.
Reed (Eds.), Intertexts: A collection of student writing (3rd ed., pp. 86-91). Fountainhead.

Common Reference Entries for Electronic or Digital Sources

Scholarly Journal Article with DOI
Author(s). (Year of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume(issue), page numbers. Full DOI
Azocar, M. J., & Ferree, M. M. (2016). Engendering the sociology of expertise. Sociology Compass,
10(12), 1079-1089. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12438

Scholarly Journal Article without DOI

APA 7th edition no longer requires “Retrieved from” unless a retrieval date is needed.
Hoffmann, A. A., & Sgrò, C. M. (2011). Climate change and evolutionary adaptation. Nature, 470(7335),
7-12. https://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/
855200411?accountid=12725

Magazine Article Found Online

Note that volume, issue, and page number(s) may not be available in online versions like in the example below.
Author(s). (Year of publication). Title of article. Title of Magazine, volume(issue), page numbers. URL
Jost, Colin. (2020, March 9). My high-school commute. The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com
/magazine/2020/03/16/my-high-school-commute

Newspaper Article Found Online

Author(s). (Year, Month Day of publication). Title of article. Title of Newspaper, URL

Spuhler, R. (2020, March 6). In Las Vegas, the home-style pizza is an everything pie. The New York
Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/travel/las-vegas-pizza.html?action=click&module
=Features&pgtype=Homepage

Full Website

Author(s) or Group’s Name. (Year of publication). Site name. URL

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2017). National Hurricane Center. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
Page from a Website with Author

Klosowski, T. (2014, February 6). How to train your mind to think critically and form your own opinions.
Lifehacker. https://lifehacker.com/how-to-train-your-mind-to-think-critically-and-form-you-
1516998286

Page from a Website with No Author or Year

At the very least, for internet sources cited on the reference page you should provide a year of
publication. However, if you know the material is current or unchanging, you can cite this material with
placeholders, such as n.d. for no date. If there is no author, check for a corporate author first. If there is
also no corporate author, you will start with the title of the source.
Ionization Energy and Electron Affinity (n.d.). http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/bp/ch7/ie_ea.html

Other Sources
Published Interviews
Depending on where you retrieved the interview (academic journal, magazine, newspaper, YouTube,
etc.), you want to make sure you followed the format for that type of source.
Pearl, N. (2005, May 16). Interview: Nancy Pearl recommends some children’s fantasy books. NPR.
https://search.proquest.com/docview/189798591?pq-origsite=summon

Personal Interviews
Since interviews provide data that cannot be retrieved or recovered by anyone else, interviews are only
cited in in-text citations. Cite the material as a personal communication.
(J. Doe, personal communication, September 7, 2017).

Reference List
● Begin your reference list on a separate page from the rest of your essay. The reference list should
also have a page number that is continuous in relation to the rest of the text. For example, if you
had four pages of writing, the reference list would begin on page 5.
● Have the term References centered and bolded in the middle of the page above the citations. Do
not italicize, underline, or use quotation marks.
● Double space all citations and do not put additional space between entries.
● All sources should have hanging indents for sources that have more than one line. This means
you should include a one-half inch indent for all lines beyond the first. (See the examples above).
● Follow capitalization rules for books, chapters, articles, and webpages which state that only the
first letter of the title, subtitle, and proper nouns should be capitalized. For more, see examples
above as well as Reference List: Basic Rules on Purdue OWL.
● All your sources should be listed in alphabetical order from A-Z using the first letter of the first
word to determine order.
○ If there is no author and you have to start with a title and the title starts with an article
like “the,” “a,” and “an,” skip to the next word.
○ If you cite multiple works by the same author, use the author’s name for all entries and
list the entries by year (earliest to latest publication date).
○ If the author appears as a sole author in one citation and the first author of a group, list
 the sole author entries first.
○ References that have the same first author and different second or third author are
arranged alphabetically by the last name of the second or third author.
○ If the author wrote more than one work in the same year, you will assign letters to the
year. For example, (1996a) and (1996b).
○ Finally, if the source begins with a number use the first letter of that number when spelled
out (ex: 5 = f, 10 = t), but don’t change the numerical form.

In-Text Citations
By using an in-text citation, you’re giving credit to the authors for their ideas and showing your reader
how to trace the source to the reference citations so that they can find the original source.

The basic format for in-text citations is (author’s last name, year). Commas are necessary to separate the
author’s last name and the year. Consider the following example:
Researchers suggest that with the rise of social media there is a loss of personal intimacy (Burrik
& Watts, 2015).

If the author’s name is already included in the text, the date is placed in parenthesis next to the last name.
Clark and Smith (2010) note that social media can take a toll on jobs and possibly result in posts
that can cost employees their position with the company.

You can also integrate the author and year into your sentence. New to APA 7th edition, if you have
more than three authors, you will use the last name of the first author followed by et al., which means
and others. Note that this is ONLY for in-text citations.
In 2013, Bipps et al. conducted a survey and found that 60 percent of employees post on social
media about work-related frustrations.

If you are citing two or more works within the same sentence or parenthesis, separate the citations with
a semicolon. Authors should be ordered alphabetically in the same order they appear in the reference list.
As social media has evolved, bullying has also followed suit and now studies suggest that 60-80
percent of bullying now takes place in cyberspace (Ling and Kim 2016; Rollins 2015).

When citing a direct quotation, you will also need to make sure you include the page number.
Lopez (2017) found that today “over 75% of all internet users use social media” (p. 345).
Research has found that today “over 75% of all internet users use social media” (Lopez, 2017, p. 345).

If you have multiple works by the same author be sure to indicate the different years of the different
works in the in-text citation. If you have multiple works from the same author in the same year, you
will need to assign these works a letter in your reference list. You will then use those letters in your in-
text citations to identify those sources. In all of these cases, the years will be separated by commas.
Goggin & Goggin (2013, 2015) found that LinkedIn is an important networking site for
professionals who are seeking ways to build business connections and relationships, especially if
you are new to the workforce.
 Reed (2017a, 2017b) notes that there has been a significant shift for younger users away from
Facebook and Twitter to platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.

If there is no author on the reference list, when citing in-text you can use a few words of the title or the
whole title if it’s short.
Surprisingly, “The Truth about Online Dating” (2016) has found that the online dating site with
the most users is Badoo; OkCupid, Tinder, and eHarmony have about 100 million total users
combined, but Badoo eclipses this number by tracking almost 300 million current users.

Finally, you may run across material that is important to your work but the source is already quoting the
material from another author. This is called a secondary source. When citing a secondary source, it’s
better to inform the reader who the researcher is within the sentence. In the in-text citation you will use
the term as cited in followed by the citation for the primary source.
Sebastian Bromstead has surveyed social media users and found that usage is split evenly
between males and females, except Pinterest, which has a user base of 79 percent females and 21
percent males (as cited in Platt & Stewart, 2016).

A final note: when writing about an event that occurred in the past, be sure to use the past tense, such as
“Clark noted” or “Smith’s research found.” For an event that is still ongoing, use the present perfect
tense, like “Clark has noted” or “Smith’s research has found.” Finally, when providing results, use the
present tense, such as “the results show” or “the experiment demonstrates.”
* Have more questions about in-text citations, such as how to integrate your quote into a sentence or how
to use attributive phrases? See our handout Quotations and Using Credible Sources.

Formatting
General Formatting
Margins should be 1 inch on the top, bottom, and sides. The document should be double spaced,
including the title and reference pages.
Title Page
Your title page, as with the rest of your paper, should be double spaced. The title page for APA is the first
page of the paper and should include a page number in the upper right hand corner as well as your title,
subtitle (if applicable), your name, the institution, course number/name, professor’s name, and the date.
Title, subtitle, your name, the institution, course number/name, professor’s name, and the date should all
be centered, and begin 3-4 double spaced lines from the top of the page. Your title should also be bolded.
Keep in mind that together your title and subtitle should only be 12 words maximum. Your title page
should look like the example on the next page. Though these are the requirements listed in APA 7th
edition, you should be sure to refer to the syllabus, assignment, and instructor to ensure you are following
the preferred format.
Running Head and Page Numbers
Under APA 7th edition guidelines, a running head is no longer required.
However, to insert the page number in the upper right hand corner, you can use the following
instructions. In Microsoft Word you can insert a header by selecting “Insert” and find the tab labeled
“Page Number.” Select “Top of Page” and “Plain Number 3.” In Google Docs, select “Insert” and about
midway down the menu hover over “Page Number.” Select the upper left box, which will provide you
with page numbers in the correct location.

1 2

English Education:
How to Be a Successful Student in College

English Education: In college you will need many skills to

How to Be a Successful Student in College be successful. Writing skills are one set of
skills that are incredibly important as you

Susy Smart make your way through college and

North Carolina State University transition into jobs and internships. As a

ENG XXX: Course Name college student, it’s important to learn what

Dr. Jed I. Knight audience and purpose to attend to. This will

March 11, 2020 help writers craft essays and documents

that are interesting, informational, and
persuasive. One way to ensure a piece is as

Missing Information
● No author: Use the corporation’s name or publisher instead of the author. If there is no
corporation or publisher, use the title of the work.
○ Examples: (The American Heritage College Dictionary, 2003) or (“The Truth about
Online Dating,” 2016).
● No date/year: Substitute the date for the abbreviation n.d. for no date. See above “Page from a
Website with No Author or Year” for an example of this in action.
● No page numbers: Include paragraph number instead using the abbreviation para. and begin
your counting from the beginning of the source if paragraph numbers are not already included.

A Final Note about APA Style

While everything above is listed based on the guidelines of the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of
the American Psychological Association, should your instructor require a different format, be sure to
follow the guidelines provided by your instructor.

Works Consulted:
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Edition) American Psychological Association;
Purdue University Online Writing Lab (https://owl.purdue.edu/index.html); University of New Hampshire Connors
Writing Center (http://www.unh.edu/writing/cwc)