In the APA citation style, references pertain to footnotes or bibliographical citations placed in a specially formatted reference page directing a reader’s attention to the original source from which a direct quote, paraphrase, or summary is taken. At the end of your essay or research paper, you are required to provide the full bibliographic information for each source that you have cited in the main bod of your text. References are normally listed in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names, and then chronologically.
The inclusion of a reference page in a research paper is required by most academic institutions and is mandated by certain copyright laws to avoid the risk of plagiarism. The APA citations that appear in your paper must have corresponding entries in this page. This list provides relevant bibliographic information necessary to identify and locate each source.
The reference format for this page is as follows:
All APA citations are arranged in the alphabetical order by the authors’ last names. Sources for which authors are not provided are arranged alphabetically by their titles within the same list. Normally, the last name of an author is listed first, followed by his initials. If a source has more than one author, a comma is used to separate each author and an ampersand (&) is used before the last author, for example: Bartholomew, N., Nixon, J., & Susskind, P. The APA style uses standard capitalization, thus only the first letter of a title or subtitle is capitalized, along with proper nouns.
If you are referring to particular pages of a work, especially periodicals such as newspapers, magazines, and journals, the abbreviation p. or pp. is used to designate page numbers, and is placed after the article title or the title of a specific reference, for example:
Winer, J. A., Jobe, T., & Ferrono, C. (1984). Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of the Charismatic Relationhip. The Annual of Psychoanalysis, pp. 155-77.
If you have references such as articles taken from encyclopedias or chapters taken from edited books, these abbreviations are also used to designate pages. Citation entries are also structured with hanging indents; the first line of an APA citation is aligned to the left margin, while the second and subsequent lines are indented by five spaces more, as shown in the above example. Titles of works, such as books and journals, as well as articles, are always italicized, not underlined.