APA Style Referencing – Key Things You Need to Know

Referencing is essential to academic writing, but with the variety of citation systems available it’s important to know your APA from your MLAs and Chicagos.

Here, we provide a brief introduction to APA style referencing, including the general format of APA references and background information on the APA system. For more detail on how to cite a book using the APA style, see this post.

What Is APA Style Referencing?

The APA referencing style comes from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition, a style guide composed by the APA for use in the social and behavioural sciences. As well as referencing, it covers various aspects of academic writing, ranging from formatting to word choice.

The Basics of APA Citations

The purpose of referencing is to cite your sources clearly and consistently, thereby helping your reader to follow your arguments and identify your influences. APA does this by using in-text citations and a reference list.

In-text citations, in APA, use an author–date format, in which you give the author’s surname and a year of publication in brackets.

If you’re quoting a source, remember to include page numbers, too:

There was ‘debate over supporter behaviour’ (Davidson, 2014, p.86).

Note that APA citations use ‘p.’ before the page number.

Multiple Authors

When a source has two named authors, their surnames should be joined by an ampersand in the citation. For example:

Too many cooks spoil the broth (Smith & Jones, 2015).

However, if the authors are named in the text, use the word ‘and’ instead:

Smith and Jones (2015) argue that too many cooks spoil the broth.

For sources with three or more authors, though, just give the first name plus ‘et al.’:

Two is company, three is a crowd (Smith et al., 1985).

You would then give the names of all authors in the reference list.

Your Reference List

Every source cited in your work should be included in your reference list with full publication information. The entry in an APA reference list for the Davidson source above, for instance, would appear as:

Davidson, N. (2014). Pirates, punks & politics. Sports Books Ltd.

More generally, with APA style referencing, you need to make sure that you:

• Invert author names (surname first, initial last).
• Order your reference list alphabetically by surname.
• Use a hanging indent for each line after the first in each entry.
• Provide a surname and initials for all authors of any source with up to seven authors; for sources with more than seven authors, provide names and initials for the first six, then use an ellipsis before giving the final name.
• List multiple works by the same author in chronological order, earliest first.
• Provide journal names in full, capitalising all major words.
• Italicise titles of books and journals.
• Capitalise only the first word and proper nouns in titles and subtitles of sources.