Chapter 10 of the 7th ed. APA Manual provides many more reference examples for numerous types of reference materials. This guide provides only a few of the citations. For more examples, see the manual.
There are 4 basic parts of a citation:
A citation or reference includes all the information needed for someone to identify and find the resource. It's like an address for the item. Citations may include any of the following: title, author, date, page numbers, publisher, place of publication, DOI, URL, etc. However, elements change to reflect what the resource is. So for example, if you are using a source from the open web, there will be an URL. If you are using a print book, well, there would be no URL.
One-author entries are
So it would look like this:
One author entries precede multiple author entries beginning with the same first name author, even if the multiple-author work was published earlier.
Multiple-author entries in which all authors appear in the same order should then be arranged by the year of publication. Multiple-author entries with the same first author and different subsequent authors are arranged alphabetically by the surname of the second author, then third, and so forth. Check out the examples below.
Confusion may arise for works with the same author(s) and dates. To distinguish between these works, put a lowercase letter after the year in both the in-text citation and the reference list.
Assigning letters is a two-step process. First, compare dates. References with only a year precede those with more specific dates, and specific dates are placed in chronological order.
Second, if the references have identical dates, alphabetize the references by title (disregarding the words "A," An," & "The" that may appear at the beginning of the reference title).
Author type |
Parenthetical citation |
Narrative citation |
| One author | (Luna, 2020) | Luna (2020) |
| Two authors | (Salas & D'Agostino, 2020) | Salas and D'Agnostino (2020) |
| Three or more authors | (Martin et al., 2020) | Martin et al. (2020) |
|
Group author with abbreviation First citation* Subsequent citations |
(National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], 2020) (NIMH, 2020) |
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, 2020) NIMH (2020) |
| Group author without abbreviation | (Stanford University, 2020) | Stanford University (2020) |
(American Psychological Association [APA], 2020)
*Note: Define the abbreviation for a group author only once in the text, choosing either the parenthetical or the narrative format. Thereafter, use the abbreviation for all mentions of the group in the text.
The design of this page was partly adapted from Research: By Course, Subject, or Topic, by University of Arizona Libraries, © 2020 The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of The University of Arizona, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.