APA Reference Page: How to Format Every Source Type
You finish the paper, format the margins, fix the headings, and then hit the reference page at 1 a.m. with six different source types and no idea which one gets italics. It is a genuinely frustrating place to lose points, and it happens for a reason: the reference page rewards exactness, not effort.
The apa reference page format comes down to one shared skeleton (APA 7, Section 2.12), applied slightly differently depending on what you are citing: a book, a journal article, a book chapter, a webpage, or a video. Learn the skeleton once, learn the five common variations below, and you can build a correct reference list for almost anything your professor assigns.
The apa reference page format every entry shares
Every reference on the page, no matter the source type, follows the same four-part order (APA 7, Chapter 9): Author. (Date). Title. Source. The author comes first because APA is an author-date system: your in-text citation points to the author and year, and the reference entry has to start the same way so a reader can find it in two seconds. Change the order, and the entry no longer matches the citation a reader is holding in their head from three pages back.
The page itself follows a fixed shape too. It starts on its own page, titled References in bold and centered at the top. Entries are double-spaced with no extra space between them, and alphabetized by the first author's last name (Section 2.12). Two authors with the same last name get sorted by first initial; one author versus a group of authors with that same last name gets sorted with the single-author entry first. If you are not sure whether your assignment wants a reference list or something looser, our breakdown of the difference between a reference list and a bibliography is worth five minutes before you start typing entries.
Sentence case versus title case
The mistake: capitalizing every major word in a book or article title, the way you would for a magazine headline.
Students carry this over from high school English, or from citing a journal name correctly and assuming the rule is the same everywhere on the page. Each part of the entry actually follows its own rule, and that catches almost everyone at least once.
Why it matters: a grader who knows APA can spot this in half a second, and it repeats across every single entry on your reference page if you get the rule wrong once.
The fix: titles of standalone works, meaning books, reports, and whole websites, along with article titles inside a journal, use sentence case. Capitalize only the first word of the title, the first word after a colon, and any proper nouns. Everything else stays lowercase, even words you would normally capitalize in a title you see on a book cover.
Journal and periodical names are the one exception, and this is exactly where the two rules collide in a single entry. Journal names use Title Case, capitalizing each major word, and they are italicized along with the volume number that follows them. So in one journal article reference, the article title is lowercase-heavy sentence case with no italics, and two words later the journal name is fully capitalized and italic. That contrast looks like a slip the first time you see it. It's exactly what APA wants.
Book
A book reference is the cleanest version of the skeleton. The title is italicized and in sentence case, and the edition, if there is one, goes in parentheses right after the title.
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book: Subtitle (2nd ed.). Publisher.
Notice what is missing: no city, no state. APA 7 dropped publisher location entirely, which surprises anyone working from an APA 6 example or an older syllabus template. Just the publisher's name, nothing else, right after the title. If your source has a DOI (increasingly common for academic press books and reports), add it as a live link at the end, formatted as https://doi.org/xxxx, and drop the closing period after a URL or DOI since it can be misread as part of the link.
Journal article
This is the pattern students get wrong most often, because it mixes both casing rules in one entry.
Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of the article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xxxx
The article title stays in sentence case, no italics. The journal name is italicized and in Title Case, and the volume number is italicized right along with it (the issue number, in parentheses, is not). Page numbers get no "pp." here, unlike a book chapter, just the numbers separated by an en dash. If the article has a DOI, and most do, include it as a full link. Do not write "doi:" in front of it and do not add "Retrieved from" unless your source genuinely requires a retrieval date, which is rare for anything with a DOI.
For two authors, both names appear every time, connected with an ampersand instead of the word "and," which only shows up in your prose sentences, never in the reference list. For three or more authors, list every author up to twenty; only past twenty do you list the first nineteen, add an ellipsis, and then the final author. Most student papers never hit that threshold, but it explains why you will see it done differently in a source with a huge author list.
Chapter in an edited book
Book chapters trip people up because there are two sets of authors involved, the chapter author and the book's editor, and only one of them gets top billing.
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of the book (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.
The chapter author leads the entry the same way any author does. The editor's initials come before their last name (the only place in APA where that flips), followed by "(Ed.)" or "(Eds.)" for more than one editor. The chapter title is sentence case with no italics; the book title is sentence case and italicized, matching the standalone-work rule above. The page range for the chapter sits in parentheses right after the book title, and this is the one pattern here that keeps "pp." in front of the numbers, since it is marking a section of a larger work rather than an article's own page span.
Webpage
Webpages are the one source type where the date gets specific, because web content changes and a year alone will not help a reader find what you saw.
Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name. https://url
The page title is sentence case, no italics, treated like any standalone work. Include the full publication date if the page shows one; if the page has no date at all, use "n.d." in place of the year, still inside the parentheses. Add the site name after the title, unless the site name and the author are the same organization, in which case you drop the site name and let the author element cover it once, rather than typing the same name twice in one entry. If there is no individual or organizational author listed at all, the page title moves into the author position instead, goes in italics there, and the entry starts with the title rather than repeating it.
Online video
Video sources use the same skeleton with one addition: a bracketed content descriptor right after the title, so a reader knows what kind of source they are looking at before they click.
Uploader. (Year, Month Day). Title of the video [Video]. YouTube. https://url
The "author" here is whoever uploaded the video, not necessarily the person speaking in it, an important distinction for interviews and recorded talks where the channel and the speaker are two different people. The title is sentence case, and "[Video]" tells the reader this is not a written source before they follow the link. That bracketed tag changes with the format: an episode of a podcast gets "[Audio podcast episode]" instead, and the pattern shifts slightly to account for the show name. If you are pulling from YouTube, a podcast, or a recorded talk, our full guide to citing YouTube videos, podcasts, and TED talks in APA 7 covers the variations this pattern does not, including multi-host podcasts and talks with no clear single uploader.
Hanging indent and alphabetical order, every time
Every pattern above assumes two mechanical rules that apply to the whole page, not just one entry. First, alphabetize by the first author's last name, and if there is no author, alphabetize by the first significant word of the title instead. Second, every entry gets a hanging indent: the first line sits flush left and every line after it indents 0.5 inches (Section 2.12).
Set the hanging indent through paragraph formatting, not by pressing Enter and Tab inside the entry. That approach looks identical on the page until you add or remove a source in the middle of the list, and the manual tabs no longer line up with anything around them. If you have not set this up correctly yet, walk through our guide on how to format the APA hanging indent correctly before you type a single reference, then apply it once to the whole page rather than entry by entry.
Do this in one step instead
You can build each of these patterns by hand and proofread the casing, the italics, and the indent on every entry yourself, or you can upload the draft and let StyleMyPaper apply the right pattern across your source types automatically, hanging indent included. We built it because this is exactly the page where careful writers still lose points over a stray comma. See how the APA formatting tool handles a full reference page in under a minute.