APA Style 7th Edition Tutorials for Students in Psychology and Social Work

References provide the information necessary for readers to identify and retrieve each work cited in the text of your paper. Accurately created and correctly formatted references help establish your credibility as a careful writer.

Four Elements of a Reference
A reference list entry generally has four elements: the author, date, title, and source. Each element answers a question:

• author: Who is responsible for this work?
• date: When was this work published?
• title: What is this work called?
• source: Where can I retrieve this work?

By considering these four elements and answering these four questions, you should be able to create a reference entry for any type of work, following the exact order of author, date, title, and source. To create your reference, you simply need to look for these elements in your source and put them together in your reference entry.

The figure below shows the first page of a journal article. The locations of the reference elements are highlighted with different colors and callouts, and the same colors are used in the reference list entry to show how the entry corresponds to the source. 

Author Element of a Reference

The author refers broadly to the person(s) or group(s) responsible for a work. An author may be

• an individual,
• multiple people,
• a group (institution, government agency, organization, etc.), or
• a combination of people and groups.

Table: Format of Individual or Group Author Names

When you cannot determine who the author is, treat the work as having no author.

Date Element of a Reference

The date refers to the date of publication of the work. The date will take one of the following forms:

• year only;
• year, month, and day (i.e., an exact date);
• year and month;
• year and season; or
• range of dates (e.g., range of years, range of exact dates).

Table: Format of the Date

When you cannot determine the date of publication, treat the work as having no date.

Title Element of a Reference

The title refers to the title of the work being cited. Titles fall into two broad categories:

• works that stand alone (e.g., whole books, reports, gray literature, dissertations and theses, informally published works, data sets, videos, films, TV series, albums, podcasts, social media, and works on websites) and
• works that are part of a greater whole (e.g., periodical articles, edited book chapters, TV and podcast episodes, and songs).

When a work stands alone (e.g., a report), the title of that work appears in the title element of the reference. When a work is part of a greater whole (e.g., a journal article or edited book chapter), the title of the article or chapter appears in the title element of the reference and the title of the greater whole (the journal or edited book) appears in the source element.

Table: Format of the Title

When the title of the work cannot be determined, treat the work as having no title.

Source Element of a Reference

The source indicates where readers can retrieve the cited work. As with titles, sources fall into two broad categories: works that are part of a greater whole and works that stand alone.

• The source for a work that is part of a greater whole (e.g., journal article, edited book chapter) is that greater whole (i.e., the journal or edited book), plus any applicable DOI or URL.
• The source for a work that stands alone (e.g., whole book, report, dissertation, thesis, film, TV series, podcast, data set, informally published work, social media, webpage) is the publisher of the work, database or archive, social media site, or website, plus any applicable DOI or URL.
• A location is not required in the source element for most works (e.g., do not include the publisher location for book references).

Table: Format of the Source

If a work is not recoverable, treat it as having no source.

The format of the source varies depending on the reference type. More information on source format can be found on the APA Style website.