Four elements, always in the same order.
Every reference in the seventh edition answers four questions in a fixed sequence: who, when, what, and where. Author, then date, then title of the work, then the source that carried it. Whatever you are citing, from a journal article to a government report to a video, the entry is assembled from those four slots and the differences between source types are differences in how a slot is filled.
This is worth knowing because it converts proofreading into diagnosis. When an entry looks wrong, identify which of the four elements is misbehaving rather than comparing the whole line against an example. Most students who find the manual bewildering are searching it by source type, which is a long list, instead of by element, which is a short one.
Capitalization is two rules wearing one coat.
The rule that catches nearly everyone is that the title of the work takes sentence case while the name of the periodical takes title case. So an article title has a capital on its first word, on the first word after a colon, and on proper nouns, and nothing else; the journal it appeared in keeps capitals on all its major words. The two sit next to each other in the same entry, styled differently on purpose.
Book, report and chapter titles follow the same sentence-case rule as article titles. The instinct to capitalize a title because it is a title is exactly the instinct to suppress here, and it accounts for more corrected entries than any other single habit. Copying a title as it appears on the article's own front page will usually reproduce the publisher's house style rather than the manual's.
Italics belong in three places and nowhere else.
Italics in a reference list carry meaning: they mark the larger container or the standalone work. Applying them by feel produces entries that look plausible and score badly, so the safest approach is a short positive list of what is italicized, and an equally short list of what is not.
- Italicize the name of the periodical, and the volume number that follows it
- Italicize the title of a work that stands alone: a book, a report, a dissertation, a film
- Italicize the title of a chapter's parent book, while the chapter's own title stays plain
- Do not italicize the article title, which is set in plain type in sentence case
- Do not italicize the issue number, which sits in parentheses immediately after the volume with no space
- Do not italicize the link at the end of the entry, whatever your word processor decides to do to it
The source element, where the marks quietly go.
The final element changed most between editions, which is why so many reference lists in circulation are formatted to an older standard. If you are working from a template, an old paper of your own, or a citation generator built some years ago, this is the element to check first and to check hardest.
- A digital object identifier is presented as a working link beginning https, not as a label reading doi followed by a colon
- The phrase retrieved from is no longer used before a link, and belongs only where a retrieval date is genuinely required because the content is designed to change
- The name of the database you searched is omitted for ordinary academic works, since the article is the source rather than the library that stored it
- Publisher location, the city and state that used to follow a book's publisher, is no longer included
- Where a work has up to twenty authors, all of them are listed; beyond that, the first nineteen appear, then an ellipsis, then the final author
- An ampersand precedes the last author in the entry itself, while narrative citations in the text use the word and
The list is also a set, and gets checked as one.
Individual entries can each be correct while the list as a whole is wrong. Three properties are checked at the level of the page: that every reference has at least one citation in the text and every citation in the text has a reference, that the entries are alphabetical by the first author's surname, and that the hanging indent has been produced by the paragraph setting rather than by tabs or spaces, which survive reflowing badly.
Run those three checks last, after the prose is final, and run them against the text rather than from memory. A citation deleted during editing leaves an orphan in the list, which is among the easiest errors for a grader to spot and the least defensible to have made. The mechanics rows on a rubric reward exactly this kind of pass, as the note on rubrics sets out, and where a whole manuscript needs the same discipline applied line by line, that is the daily work of the copy desk.
Questions to the desk.
Should article titles be capitalized in an APA 7 reference?
No. Article, book, chapter and report titles take sentence case, meaning a capital on the first word, on the first word after a colon or dash, and on proper nouns only. The name of the journal, magazine or newspaper is the exception and keeps title case. Copying a title exactly as the publisher displays it will usually give you the wrong style.
Do I still write retrieved from before a link?
Only in the narrow case where a retrieval date is needed because the content is designed to change over time, such as a page that is continuously updated. For ordinary sources, the link stands alone at the end of the entry. Digital object identifiers are given as complete working links rather than as a label followed by the number.
Can a citation generator be trusted for reference lists?
Treat its output as a first draft rather than a finished entry. Generators frequently reproduce a publisher's capitalization, invent or omit issue numbers, keep obsolete elements such as publisher location, and mislabel source types. Checking a generated entry against the four elements takes about half a minute each, which is far less than the marks a whole list of unchecked entries can cost.
What if a source has no author or no date?
Move the title into the author position when there is genuinely no author, whether personal or corporate, and use the abbreviation for no date in place of the year. Both are ordinary and neither is a reason to omit the source. Before doing either, look carefully for an organizational author, since reports and web pages published by an institution are authored by that institution.
