How to Write an APA Format Bibliography, how to format a bibliography.

Bibliographies can be a great way to keep track of information you might want to use in your paper and as a way to organize and keep track of the information that you find in different sources. In order to write an APA format bibliography, here are four steps you should take.

Even if it is not a required part of your assignment, writing a bibliography can help you keep track of your sources and make it much easier to create your final reference page in proper APA format.

Compile all the sources you might possibly use in your paper. While you may end up not using all of these sources in your paper, having a complete list will make it easier later on when you prepare your reference section.

If you are taking a psychology class, you may be asked at some point to create a bibliography as part of the research paper writing process. Even if your instructor does not expressly require a bibliography, creating one can be a useful way to help structure your research and make the writing process easier.

Start on a New Page

An annotation is a brief description of approximately 150 words describing the information in the research, your evaluation of its credibility, and how it pertains to your topic.   Writing one of these for each piece of research will make your writing process faster and easier.

An APA format bibliography is an alphabetical listing of all sources that might be used to write an academic paper, essay, article, or research paper. In some cases, your instructor may require you to hand in a bibliography with your final paper.

Not only is this step helpful in determining which sources to ultimately use in your paper, but also your instructor may require it as part of the assignment so they can assess your thought process and understanding of your topic.

The formatting isn’t simple at all. There are different requirements for things like dated and non-dated sources or human vs corporate authors. The supplied Word XSL bibliography formats range from over 5,600 lines of code to 9,300 lines for the Turabian option.

A common question is changing the open and close brackets for a citation. These are controlled by the OpenBracket and CloseBracket names (search for those terms in a Word XSL and they’ll appear.

With your choice of open or close brackets. The final result looks like this:

If you must make your own Bibliography style, start with an existing XSL that’s closest to what you need and make the changes.

It’s already been done

In the same part of the XSL you’ll find other common settings like:

Word has many supplied Bibliography formats or styles to choose from. It’s possible to add your own custom formats to suit your needs.

First, a quick look at how Word figures out how to format or arrange a citation.

It is also important at this level to learn why it's critical to cite sources, not just how to cite them.

It's super easy to create MLA style citations with our MLA Citation Generator. Scroll back up to the generator at the top of the page and select the type of source you're citing. Books, journal articles, and webpages are all examples of the types of sources our generator can cite automatically. Then either search for the source, or enter the details manually in the citation form.

The Works Cited page contributes to the overall grade of a paper, so it is important to produce accurately formatted citations that follow the guidelines in the official MLA Handbook.

Writing citations manually is time consuming and error prone. Automating this process with a citation generator is easy, straightforward, and gives accurate results. It's also easier to keep citations organized and in the correct order.

👩‍🎓 Who uses an MLA Citation Generator?

The generator will produce a formatted MLA citation that can be copied and pasted directly into your document, or saved to MyBib as part of your overall Works Cited page (which can be downloaded fully later!).

Generate accurate citations in MLA format automatically, with MyBib!

An MLA citation generator is a software tool designed to automatically create academic citations in the Modern Language Association (MLA) citation format. The generator will take information such as document titles, author, and URLs as in input, and output fully formatted citations that can be inserted into the Works Cited page of an MLA-compliant academic paper.

Citing an image found in a print publication (such as a book or magazine) or museum:

Author's Last name, F. M. (Year published). Title of work. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxxx or URL

If your source was written by a company, organization, government agency, or other type of group, include the group's name in full in the first in text or parenthetical citation. In any APA citations following it, it is acceptable to shorten the group name to something that is simple and understandable.

Sayre, R. K., Devercelli, A. E., Neuman, M. J., & Wodon, Q. (2015). Investment in early childhood development: Review of the world bank's recent experience. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0403-8

Citations for Magazines

Notes: When creating an online magazine citation, keep in mind:

APA style is used by many scholars and researchers in the behavioral and social sciences, not just psychology. There are other citation formats and styles such as MLA and Chicago citation style, but this one is most popular in the fields of science.

Smith (2014) states that, "the Museum Effect is concerned with how individuals look at a work of art, but only in the context of looking at that work along with a number of other works" (p. 82). "The Museum Effect is concerned with how individuals look at a work of art, but only in the context of looking at that work along with a number of other works" (Smith, 2014, p. 82).

When no author is listed, exclude the author information and start the citation with the title followed by the year in parentheses.

Kenny, A. (2010). A new history of Western philosophy: In four parts. Oxford University Press.

For each source, start by writing a full reference that gives the author, title, date, and other information. The exact format depends on the type of source (e.g., a book or journal article) and the citation style you’re using. The most common styles are APA, MLA, and Chicago.

The first line of any additional paragraphs should be indented an additional time.

The annotations themselves are usually between 50 and 200 words in length. This can vary depending on the word count of the assignment, the relative length and importance of different sources, and the number of sources you include, but try to aim for this as a guideline.

Descriptive annotations

Rieger, A. (2019). Doing business and increasing emissions? An exploratory analysis of the impact of business regulation on CO2 emissions. Human Ecology Review, 25(1), 69–86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26964340.

An annotated bibliography is a list of source references that includes a short descriptive text (an annotation) for each source. It may be assigned as part of the research process for a paper, or as an individual assignment to gather and read relevant sources on a topic.

In MLA, the Works Cited entry and the annotation are both double-spaced and left-aligned.

Use these keywords to search databases (e.g. JSTOR, Project MUSE, Google Scholar). See here for further guidance on keyword searching.