Skip to Main Content

WILLIS N. HACKNEY LIBRARY

Online Tutorial--APA-Style Citations, 7th Edition

This online tutorial walks you through how to create reference and in-text citations in APA Style's 7th edition.

Creating APA Citations from Scratch--Examples

When you create an APA citation for your References list (the list of complete or full citations on the References page at the end of your paper or assignment), you will first need to gather all the information you will include (like those items mentioned in Step 5), and then format that information based on a template like that from PurdueOWL or from the Publication Manual, or from the APA web site or blog, with adapted examples below for a book and for an article.  These examples are both for print format:

For a print book (with two authors):

Template:  Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year of publication). Title of work. Publisher.

Christian, B., & Griffiths, T. (2016). Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions. Henry Holt and Co.

For a print article (with one author):

Template:  Author, A. A. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages. 

Anderson, M. (2018). Getting consistent with consequences. Educational Leadership, 76(1), 26-33.

Note the following about the above citations:

  • All authors' names (whether only one author or multiple authors) appear with the last name first, followed by a comma, and then the first and middle initials only (no first or middle names are spelled out).
  • The title of a book or an article title is capitalized using sentence capitalization, in which only the first word of the title is capitalized, and all others are lower-cased (like in a sentence). 
    • An exception to this capitalization style is that if words other than the first are proper names or nouns, such as "American," then they would also be capitalized:  One hundred years of American psychiatry.
  • The title of a periodical (such as a magazine, newspaper, or journal), however, uses headline capitalization, in which all the major words are capitalized (like in a headline):  The New Criterion.
  • The publisher's name for a book must be included in the citation (but NOT the place of publication, according to APA, 7th edition).
  • The volume and issue numbers for a periodical (magazine, newspaper, journal) must be included in the citation. 
  • The page numbers on which the article appears in a periodical (magazine, newspaper, journal) must be included in the citation.

Now we are going to look more closely at Reference citations for an ebook and Reference citations for an article.  Go now to the links in the sidebar to Step 6A (below right or in the left sidebar) and then Step 6B under Step 6.