Citing Books per APA Rules

Following is information about how the various elements of your APA reference list entry for this book should be formatted.

Author name(s) - see pp. 285-289

• Authors' names should be listed in your citation in the order in which they appear on the book. (Author order generally reflects the level of each author's contribution to the book, so the author whose name appears first is usually the author who made the greatest contribution to the book.)
  • Example: Smith, A., Jones, R., & French, C.
• Authors' names should be written with each author's last name first, followed by the author's initials, with a period after each initial. (Authors' first names should not appear in citations, even when they appear on a book.) If an author's middle initial appears on a book, it should appear in your citation, and there should be a space between the author's first and middle initials.
  • Example: Chao, J. A.
• If the book has between two and 20 authors, there should be a comma after each author's name except for the last author's, and there should be an ampersand (&) before the last author's name.
  • Example: Smith, A., Jones, R., & French, C.
• Authors' titles and honorific (PhD, JD, etc.) should not appear in citations; only last names and first and middle initials should appear in citations.
• If an author's name includes a suffix, it should appear after the author's initials.
  • Example: Anderson, F. A., III
• If an author's first name includes a hyphen, there should be a period after each of the author's initials, with a hyphen between each of the initials.
  • Example: Wang, Y.-H.
• See the APA Manual for information about citing an edited book rather than an authored book.

Publication date - see pp. 289-291

• The publication year should be put between parentheses.
• There should be a period after the parenthesis following the publication year.
• Note that any date that appears after an author's name is not the book's publication date. In the image shown above, for example, 1943 is the year in which author Stephen P. Robbins was born. The book was published in 2009, the year listed in the "published" section of the book's record.
• Example: (2009).

Title of the book - see pp. 291-293

• The book's title should be italicized.
• Regardless of how a book's title appears in a catalog record or on the book itself, the only words in the book's title that should begin with a capital letter in your reference list citation are the first word of the title and the first word of the subtitle, although proper nouns (e.g., United States) and initialisms (e.g., FBI) should retain their capitalization.
• There should be a period at the end of the book's title, unless the title ends with another punctuation mark (?, !, etc.) or unless the book has an edition number.
  • If the book has an edition number, this information should be provided in regular, unitalicized font between parentheses after the book's title, with no period between the book's title and the parenthetical information. There should be a period after the closing parenthesis following the edition number, however.
  • The suffix indicating the edition number (-st, -nd, -rd, -th) should not be superscripted, and there should be a period after the suffix.
• Example: Organization theory and design (12th ed.).
• See the APA Manual for information about citing a chapter in a book rather than an entire book.

Publisher information - see pp. 295-296

• The publisher's name should be written in your citation as it appears on the book that you're citing.
  • Do not include designations of business structure (e.g., Inc., LLC, Ltd.) after a publisher's name.
  • There's no need to standardize a publisher's name if it appears differently on different sources; it's OK, for instance, to have one reference list entry for a book with SAGE Publishing listed as the publisher and another entry for a different book with Sage Publications listed as the publisher.
  • If the book's author is also the publisher (as is the case for the APA Manual, for example, in which the book was both written and published by the American Psychological Association; see the reference at the end of this web page), give the publisher's name in the author portion of the reference list entry only; do not include the publisher's name a second time at the end of the reference list entry.
• There should be a period after the publisher's name.
• Example: Sage Publications.

DOI - see pp. 298-301

• If a print or online book has a DOI (digital object identifier), this should be the last element of your citation. As discussed in the APA Manual, a DOI may appear in URL format (e.g., http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0024996 or https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024996) or in "standard" format (e.g., 10.1037/a0024996). The Manual says that all DOIs should be presented in https://doi.org/ format, so you will need to make any necessary changes to the DOI that appears on the source that you're citing; you may need to add or modify the prefix before the DOI.
  • Tip: A book's DOI will always contain 10. followed by four numbers, a slash, and a string of letters and/or numbers. An online book's DOI often appears in the book's database record, although it may also appear somewhere in the first few pages of the book itself. ISBNs are not DOIs, and they should not appear in your citation.

• If a book does not have a DOI, your citation will end after the publisher's name (or after the book's title, if the book's publisher is also its author).

Additional information about reference lists - see p. 303-306

• Your reference list should begin on a new page, with the word References at the top of the page, centered and in bold font.
• Your reference list should be double-spaced, both within and between entries. (Although some citation examples may appear to be single-spaced, this was done to conserve space. The seventh edition of the APA Manual says [on p. 303] that reference list citations should be double-spaced.)
• The entries in your reference list should be alphabetized by the first major word of each entry, which is usually an author's last name.
• The first line of each of your reference list entries should be flush left. All subsequent lines of your citation should be indented 1/2" from the left margin. This is referred to as a "hanging indent."

Sample APA reference list entry for a book with a DOI

Following is an example of a properly formatted reference list entry for the seventh edition of the APA Publication Manual, a book that has a DOI and a book for which the author is also the publisher.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Sample APA reference list for book without a DOI

Following is an example of a properly formatted reference list entry for the book shown in the image at the top of this page:

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2009). Organizational behavior (13th ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall.

Important note: Although many databases, citation management tools, and word processing programs offer suggested citations, these citations frequently contain errors since they're automatically generated. You should always double-check citations against the guidelines listed in the seventh edition of the APA Manual. You are ultimately responsible for ensuring that your citations are formatted correctly; you cannot rely on the accuracy of any automatically generated citations.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

If you have any questions about this information, please use the UMGC Library's Ask a Librarian service to receive assistance.