Sara Lee

APA Lesson Four

Creating References

Carol J. Amato

University of Phoenix

COMM 102: Communication Skills for Career Growth

April 4, 2002

Lesson Three discussed how to add citations to the text. Now our readers know which parts of the report came from other sources. That’s only half the battle, however. What if one of those readers wants to go back to the original source and read more detail? All we gave as information in the citation was the author’s last name, the copyright year, and possibly the page number. What book or article did that information come from, however? The reader can’t tell from the little bit of information we gave; therefore, we have to add a reference list to the end of the report giving the detailed information. The citations, then, act as pointers to the reference list.

Sources of References

Over the course of your career here at UOP, you will be citing all kinds of sources, such as books, magazines and journals, newspapers, company brochures, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and government documents, to name just some. These sources could be from print versions of these documents or from the Internet. You have to include complete information about the source you used so that the reader will know exactly how to find the original book or magazine.

Setting Up the Reference Page

Place the references on a separate page at the end of your report. Center the title “References” at the top of the page. List the references themselves in alphabetical order by author last name.

Creating the Reference

Each type of source (book, magazine, newspaper, dictionary, etc.) has a specific way of being referenced. Not only do the sources have their own ways of being referenced, but the information is listed differently depending on the number of authors, whether there is no author, whether there is an editor or an author and an editor, etc. What does this mean? It means it is impossible to memorize all of these formats; therefore, it is critical that you have a comprehensive APA manual that has examples of all of them. This lesson shows you how to format a reference for a book with one author and an article with one author.

Referencing a Book With One Author

A reference for a book with one author appears as shown in Figure 1 and consists of the following elements:

1. Author's last name.

2. Author's first initial and middle initial, if available

3. Year book was copyrighted

4. Title of book

5. City where publisher is located

6. Name of publisher

To create this reference, follow these steps:

1. Starting at the left margin, type the author's last name in full, followed by a comma and a space.

2. Type the author's first initial (not the full first name), followed by a period and a space, then the middle initial (if available), followed by a period and a space. If the author's middle name is not listed, just use the first initial.

Remember: Never, never use the full first name!

3. Then type the copyright year in parentheses, followed by a period and a space.

4. Type the book title and italicize it. Only the first word has a capital letter; the rest of the words are lower case.

If there is no subsequent edition, place a period after the title, then a space.

If there is a subsequent edition, type a space, then an opening parenthesis, followed by the edition number in abbreviated format (i.e., 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.). Then type the abbreviation “ed,” followed by a period, a closing parenthesis, and another period.

5. Then type the city of publication, a colon, a space, then the name of the publisher, followed by a period. Include the two-letter state code or country name if the city is not listed in Table 15 on page 161 (i.e., Blue Ridge Summit, PA). For the state code abbreviation, see Table 13, page 56.

6. Continue your reference all the way to the right margin. If it continues to a second line, double-space the second line and indent it three spaces.

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