 Building a Reference List with APA Seventh You've done the research, and now you have a lot of high-quality articles, books, and websites to put on your reference list. Now where to begin? We all know reference lists are fussy and take time, but they are very important because they list all the sources you used when writing your paper. A reference list is sometimes called a bibliography, and each item in the list is called a citation. Here are some tips to help you do a great reference list. Use a guide. A citation guide is a set of rules outlining how to properly cite sources in academic writing, offering specific formats for various source types. It ensures consistency and accuracy in citation. You can access a free online APA guide by going to the Citation and Research Hub on the Learning Portal to find links to your college's citation guides. Whenever you're unsure of what to do, you can always refer to your citation guide. Reflect your sources in two places. If something is on your reference list, it should also appear somewhere earlier in your assignment as an in-text citation. An in-text citation is the original author's name in parentheses, usually following a quote, fact, or idea, italics, punctuation, and capitalization. In an APA reference list, the formatting will include a variety of punctuation, quotation marks, and italics. There are specific rules about what does and doesn't get italicized or enclosed in quotations, as well as where all the punctuation goes. This all depends on the type of source you are citing. For example, if you are citing a journal article, only the title of the journal itself will be italicized. Everything else, including the title of the article, will be normal. For a website, the title of the page you are citing is italicized, but the title of the website itself is not. Periods usually denote the end of a section of information, while a comment denotes more information about one piece of information. APA style uses two types of capitalization structures, title case and sentence case. In reference list entries, sentence case is used. In sentence case, capitalize only the first word of the title, proper noun, and words following a colon or m-dash. Title case is used in the body of your paper. In title case, major words are capitalized, and most minor words are lowercase. APA reference list formatting has a lot of detailed differences, depending on the type of source you are citing, where you retrieve the source, and the information you are able to find. Because it can be so particular, it is always important to consult a citation guide. Author slash Authors For a single author, list the last name first, followed by a comma, then the first initial and middle initial if available. For two authors, list by their last names and initials. Separate author names with a comma. Use the ampersand instead of an and. Provide surnames and initials in this way for up to and including 20 authors. When there are two to 20 authors, use an ampersand before the final author's name. When there are 21 or more authors, include the first 19 names, insert an ellipse, but no ampersand, and then add the final author's name. Group authors can include corporations, government agencies, organizations, etc. Here, you can treat the publishing organization the same way you treat the author's name and format the rest of the citation as normal. Be sure to give the full name of the group author in your reference list, although abbreviations may be used in your text. For example, you'd use the Center for Addiction and Mental Health as the author instead of C-A-M-H. When the work does not have an author, move the title of the work to the beginning of the reference and follow with the date of publication. Identifier For online sources, you should include a location to show readers where you found the source. Many scholarly databases use a DOI, Digital Object Identifier. Use a DOI in your citation if you can. Otherwise, use a URL. The DOI or URL is usually the last element in a citation and should not be followed by a period. Page Title Start your reference list on a new page at the end of your assignment and title the page, References, in bold. Do not use italics, underline, or quotation marks. Center the word references at the top of the page. Only the title should be centered. The citation entries themselves should be aligned with the left margin. Alphabetical Order Entries are listed alphabetically by the author's last name or, for entire edited collections, editor's names. In cases where there is no author, use the first word of the citation and place appropriately in the alphabetical order. Hanging Indent If citation is more than one line, every line but the first is indented. This is called the Hanging Indent. You can set this up automatically in Microsoft Word by highlighting your citation, choosing paragraph from the format menu, then select Hanging from the special dropdown menu. Double Space Don't forget the entire document should be double spaced, including your reference list. To sum it up, putting together a reference list is the cherry on top of your research paper. It's a simple way to say, hey, I did my research, and here's the proof. And it's an important final step to give credit where it's due. It may seem confusing and complicated to properly cite your sources, but by filing these simple steps, you'll have it mastered in no time. If you ever need a little more help, check out the Citation and Research module on the Learning Portal or contact your college library.