Every reference entry answers the same four questions

The four-element pattern

Every APA 7 reference entry, whatever the source, is built from the same four elements in the same order.

Author. (Date). Title. Source.

Author is who is responsible. Date is when it was published. Title is what the thing is called. Source is where a reader can find it, which might be a journal, a publisher, or a website. Every template you will ever look up is a variation on how those four elements are dressed.

Authors, and where people go wrong

Invert every author’s name: surname, then initials with periods and spaces between them. Use an ampersand before the final author, not the word “and”. Keep the order the source uses, never alphabetize within a single entry.

Number of authors	What to do
1 to 20	List every one
21 or more	First 19, an ellipsis, then the final author
Group author	Write the group’s full name, not an abbreviation
No author	Move the title into the author position
Editor instead of author	Name, then (Ed.) or (Eds.)

If the author and the publisher are the same organization, which is common with government reports, name the author once and leave the publisher position empty rather than repeating it.

The entries you are most likely to need

Capitalization is the most common single error

APA 7 uses two different capitalization schemes in the same entry, which is why it catches so many people.

Sentence case for the titles of articles, chapters, books and reports: capitalize only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Title case for the name of a journal: capitalize all major words.

The article title is in sentence case with a capital after the colon. The journal name is in title case. Italics go on the journal name and the volume number, not on the issue number or the page range.

Ordering the list

Alphabetical by the first author’s surname, compared letter by letter. Beyond that, three rules resolve almost everything.

A single author comes before that same author with co-authors, so Okafor, A. B. (2019) precedes Okafor, A. B., & Raine, C. (2018) even though the year is later.

The same authors in the same order are sorted by year, earliest first.

Same authors and same year get letters after the year, assigned by the alphabetical order of the titles: 2021a, 2021b. Those letters must match whatever you used in the text, which is why the list has to be finished before the in-text citations can be finalized.

Formatting the list itself

Start it on a new page with the word References centered and bold at the top. Keep the same double spacing as the rest of the paper, with no extra space between entries. Every entry gets a hanging indent of half an inch.

Use your word processor’s indentation setting rather than tabs or manual line breaks. A list indented by hand looks correct until the document is opened at a different page size, at which point every entry collapses.

The check that catches the most points

Put the reference list beside the document and confirm two things in both directions. Every in-text citation has an entry in the list. Every entry in the list is cited at least once in the text.

An orphaned reference is the clearest possible signal that a source was added to look thorough rather than read, and it is one of the few errors a grader can verify in seconds.