APA 7th referencing

This brief checklist highlights some general points to pay attention to when editing your in-text citations and reference list. For the components and formatting required for specific reference types, please consult the relevant sections of this APA referencing guide.

In-text citations

Have you included an in-text citation each time you have paraphrased, summarised or quoted information from another source?

Are direct quotations enclosed in quote marks with a page number or paragraph provided, in addition to the author and date of the source?

Does each in-text citation have a corresponding reference list entry?

Reference list

Does the reference list only include sources that have been cited in the text?

Does the reference list start on a new page or slide, after the content of your assessment, with the word ‘References’ in bold and centred at the top of the page?

Does the reference list have double-spacing, both within and between references?

Is the reference list ordered alphabetically by the first author’s last name or name of the organisation responsible for the content? If the reference has no author, does it use the first significant word in the title?

Do all references have a hanging indent of 1.27cm? How do I create a hanging indent?

Are titles, with the exception of journal names, in sentence case capitalisation, where only the first word, proper nouns, and words following certain types of punctuation (full stops, colons, etc.) are capitalised?

Example: Youth subcultures: Theory, history and the Australian experience

Are journal names presented in full (not in an abbreviated form) and in headline-style capitalisation, where every significant word is capitalised?

Example: New England Journal of Medicine

Do all online sources have an address to help the reader locate the item? Either a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or a URL if there is no DOI?

Are all DOIs preceded by https://doi.org/?

Are all DOIs and URLs presented consistently either as live links (blue and underlined) OR plain text that is not underlined?