APA Reference Page

• Start a new page after the body (and before any appendices).
• Title: the word References — bold, centered, no quotation marks, no underline. (One source only? Still "References.")
• Double-space everything — no extra blank lines between entries.
• Hanging indent: first line of each entry flush left, every following line indented ½ inch.

Alphabetize by the first author's surname, letter by letter. Multiple works by the same author sort by year, oldest first. Same author and year? Add letters — 2013a, 2013b — sorted by title, and use the letters in your in-text citations too. Works with no author alphabetize by title, ignoring A, An, and The.

Every entry follows author → date → title → source. Italicize the standalone work: the journal name and volume, the book title, the web page title. Sentence case for article and book titles; Title Case for journal names.

Include: every source cited in the text — one entry each, no matter how many times cited. Exclude: sources you read but never cited (that would make it a bibliography, not a references page), personal communications like emails and interviews (cited in text only), and whole websites mentioned in passing.

The matching rule cuts both ways: every in-text citation needs an entry, every entry needs at least one in-text citation. Mismatches are the most common points deduction there is.

Here's what three sources look like as a finished list — note the alphabetical order (Alvarez → Martin → Rasch), and imagine each entry double-spaced with a hanging indent:

• Letter by letter, nothing-before-something: Brown precedes Browning.
• Mc/Mac sort literally — MacDonald before McAllister, despite how they sound.
• Ignore A/An/The when sorting no-author titles.
• Same first author, different co-authors: the solo work comes first; then sort by the second author's surname.
• Numerals sort as words: 21st-century learning files under T (twenty-first).

A references page rarely holds only articles, books, and web pages. The next most common entries:

• Chapter in an edited book — Chapter author. (Year). Chapter title. In E. Editor (Ed.), Book title (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.
• Report — Organization. (Year). Title of report (Report No. 123). Publisher or URL.
• Dissertation — Author. (Year). Title [Doctoral dissertation, University]. Database or repository.
• Video — Channel or creator. (Year, Month Day). Title [Video]. YouTube. URL.
• Dataset — Author. (Year). Title of dataset (Version) [Data set]. Repository. DOI
• Conference paper — Author. (Year). Title. In Proceedings title (pp. xx–xx). Publisher. DOI

End-of-entry links are where references pages get visually mangled. The rules: DOIs always as full links (https://doi.org/10.xxxx), URLs only when there's no DOI, no period after either (it can break the link), no "Retrieved from" unless a retrieval date is genuinely needed, and live-link styling (blue/underlined) is fine if consistent. Word's auto-capitalize loves to break long URLs across lines with hyphens — our Word export sidesteps all of it.