Let's take a look at an example reference entry for a scholarly journal article in APA style.

While each entry will differ slightly depending upon what type of source it is, it will usually have four basic parts:

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?

1. Author

Authors' names are always formatted with the last name first, followed by any initials for first and middle names.

If there is more than one author, but less than 20, you can separate each with a comma and put an & before the last one, as in:

Shoss, M. K., Jiang, L., & Probst, T. M.

If there are 21 or more authors, you can list the first 19 authors, followed by three spaced ellipsis points (. . . ) and the final author's name, as in:

Baker, T., Clark, J., Nilson, J., Carlson, M., Martinez, J., Leksell, J., Kolke, J., Smith, T., Robinson, J., Greenlee, T., Benson, J., Thieme, N., Kopko, C., Lopez, K., Lee, I., Johnson, T., Zeloi, P., Walker, P., Lendee, R., . . . Chin, A.

2. Date

The date should always follow the author, be placed in parentheses, and end with a period, as in:

(2018).

3. Title

The title of the work follows the date. Only capitalize the first letter of the first word of the title and subtitle (i.e., the first letter of the first word following a colon or question mark), a style that is called "sentence case." You should also capitalize any proper nouns, such as the names of people, countries, or products. A period should come at the end, as in:

Bending without breaking: A two-study examination of employee resilience in the face of job insecurity.

4. Source

The source information comes at the end of the entry. If the work is a scholarly journal article, this includes information including the journal title, volume, issue, page number range, and DOI (digital object identifier), as in:

Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 23(1), 112-126. http://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000060

The next sections show examples of how to format different types of sources in APA style.

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