APA Citations (7th edition)

APA: Citing Books & eBooks from Lawrence W. Tyree Library on Vimeo: View a transcript here.

In this tutorial, you will learn the basics for citing a book, how to cite if there is more than one author or if a book is not a first edition, and how to cite a chapter from an edited book. Regardless if you use a print book or an eBook, you will cite it in the same way. There is no differentiation.

Every APA reference needs four parts: author, date, title, and source. As you go through these examples, you will learn how to identify these four parts and how to place and format them into a proper APA reference.

Example 1: A Book With One Author

For the first example, you will learn how to cite this book: Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change.

The first step is to identify the author of the book. This can usually be found on the cover or title page.

To list an author, write the last name, a comma, and the first and middle initials, followed by a period.

Example:
McGraw, S.

Next, identify when this book was written. In this case, you will need to open the book and look inside, usually on the back of the title page, to find the date, 2015.

List the date after the author, in parentheses, followed by a period.

Example:
McGraw, S. (2015).

Next, identify the title. Even though there is no colon on the page, Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change is styled differently and in a smaller font. This shows that it is the subtitle, and should be separated from the title with a colon.

List the title of the book after the date, in italics. Make sure you only capitalize the first word of the title, the first word of the subtitle, which comes after the colon, and any proper nouns.

Example:
McGraw, S. (2015). Betting the farm on a drought: Stories from the front lines of climate change.

Next, you need to identify the source. For books, you need the publisher. The book's title page shows that the publisher is University of Texas Press.

Type the name of the publisher, and end with a period.

Example:
McGraw, S. (2015). Betting the farm on a drought: Stories from the front lines of climate change. University of Texas Press.

The last piece of information you need is the DOI, which stands for digital object identifier. You can find a book’s DOI on the back of the title page. Not every book and eBook will have a DOI available. If there is no DOI, then this element can be omitted.

If the book contains a DOI, then include it after the publisher. First, type https://doi.org/ and then the book’s DOI. Otherwise, end after the publisher. This concludes the reference.

Example:
McGraw, S. (2015). Betting the farm on a drought: Stories from the front lines of climate change. University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/756618

If you refer to a work in your paper, either by directly quoting, paraphrasing, or by referring to main ideas, you will need to include an in-text parenthetical citation. There are a number of ways to do this. In this example, a signal phrase is used to introduce a direct quote. Note that the author's name is given in the text, and the publication date and page number(s) are enclosed in parentheses at the beginning and end of the sentence.

Example:
As McGraw (2015) writes, "As with the nuclear danger in the 1960s, the potential risks of global climate change are staggering" (p. 39).

Example 2: Multiple Authors; Editions

For this next book, there are two authors. You can obtain the date, the title, and the publisher from the book, using the steps illustrated in the first example. Note that this book is a eighth edition. You will need to include that information in your citation as well.

When citing multiple authors, list the first author as normal, followed by a comma, an ampersand (&), and then the second author. In this example, the first author has a middle initial, so this is included. The edition is placed right after the title but before the period.

Example:
Wald, K. D., & Calhoun-Brown, A. (2018). Religion and politics in the United States (8th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Example 3: A Chapter in an Edited Book

In this example, the entire book is overseen by editors, but each chapter has a different author. If you are only using information from a single chapter, you will need to cite it a certain way.

First, find the general information for this book, as demonstrated in the previous examples. Then you need to locate the author, title, and page numbers of the chapter you are citing.

To cite, list the author of the chapter first, followed by the date and then the title of the chapter. Note that the title of the chapter is not in italics. Then type the word In, and list the editors of the book, with the initials first. At the end of their names, list Ed. or Eds. in parentheses, which is the abbreviation for editor or editors. Then, type a comma, the title of the book, and include the page numbers in parentheses. End with the publisher.

Example:
Landes, D. (2000). Culture makes almost all the difference. In L. E. Harrison & S. P. Huntington (Eds.), Culture matters: How values shape human progress (pp. 2–13). Basic Books.

This page is excerpted from APA: Citing Books & eBooks from Lawrence W. Tyree Library.