The APA form of the referencing is one of the most used methods of the referencing. This form of the referencing is quite elaborate in nature. Now, out of the previous experience, most of the students make a mistake in this from of the referencing. Now, let me make this form of the referencing clearer. It is not difficult, just follow certain rules.
The name of the author is always put in the first place; this is followed by a comma, the first initial and the middle initial (The use of the middle initial is not advised by me. I have one rule; avoid what is possible to avoid confusion).
There can be more that one authors in most of the cases. But, again; if it exceeds three ; use et al. This helps in making it simpler.
The name of the editor should be mentioned in place of author’s name.
The date always comes second.
There is one rule. The title should always come in front of the date.
The titles should be always be italicized. The first word of the subtitle is also capitalized.
The place is always the city, ST. The country name may be used in the case of the non-availability of the city specific information.
EXAMPLES
The Examples of the referencing are as follows. I shall also attach other links that would help with the compete referencing.
BOOK
Gessler, E. M. (1998). Guide to cultural assessment (2nd ed.). St. Louis, MO: Mosby.
BOOK CHAPTER, ESSAY, or ARTICLE when author is credited
de Paula, T. C. M., Lagana, K., & Gonzalez-Ramirez, L. (1996). Americans. In J. G. Lipson, S. L Dibble, & P. A. Minarik (Eds.), nursing care: pocket guide (pp. 203-221). San Francisco: USCF Nursing Press.
BOOK CHAPTER, ESSAY, or ARTICLE when no author is credited (paper version)
Russians. (1998). In T. L. Gall (Ed.), Worldmark encyclopedia of cultures and daily life (Vol. 4, pp. 332-339). Detroit, MI: Gale Research.
BOOK CHAPTER, ESSAY, or ARTICLE when no author is credited (online version)
Russians. (1998). Worldmark encyclopedia of cultures and daily life. Retrieved January 9, 2003 from Discovering Collection database.
Internet Sources and Tools
There are a number of good links to help in the referencing.
The Monash University library provides the general rules and examples of the APA style references.
There are a number of the referencing tools that may be used for the citation. They are mentioned here. But, there is one piece of advice. It is always better to go for the manual type of the referencing. It avoids unnecessary confusion. If you use these tools then always double check after the reference list has been generated.
There is another method that may be used. All of us have used the Microsoft Word. In all the versions of 2007 and above, there is an option to do APA referencing. Please have a look a t it. It is self explanatory guys. The screenshot is given below-
This website provides the tools to auto cite the information sources. The software name is called as CMachine that gets the information from your source and generate the standard reference and in-text citation.
Citation Creation is good tool that can be used to create the MLA , APA and Chicago styles of citations. You can enter any type of source like book, encyclopaedia, article, magazine, journals, websites.
This tool takes the raw information in the form of author, title etc. and generates the reference list in the desired format. This tool provides the references of different styles like Harvard style reference, APA style.