APA Citation Guide (APA 7th Edition): Reference List & Sample Paper

This is a sample APA paper from OWL at Purdue with annotations to show you the different elements of APA style.

APA has a couple of sample papers showing student research papers. One of which includes annotations highlighting the elements of the APA style.

Appendix

If you are adding an appendix to your paper there are a few rules to follow that comply with APA guidelines:

The Appendix appears after the Reference list
If you have more than one appendix you would name the first appendix Appendix A, the second Appendix B, etc.
The appendices should appear in the order that the information is mentioned in your essay
Each appendix begins on a new page

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. This is called References.

See an example in the "Sample Paper & Reference List" box on this page.

Here are eight quick rules for this list:

Start a new page for your reference list (e.g., if your paper is 4 pages long, start your References on page 5).
Center the title, References. The title should be capitalized and in bold.
Double-space the list entries (including between and within references).
Use a hanging indent for all references, meaning that the first line of each reference is flush left and subsequent lines are indented by 0.5 inch.
Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the citation. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first initial followed by a period.
Italicize the titles of full works: books, audiovisual material, websites.
Do not italicize titles of parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document. Instead, use quotation marks.