A research paper or any scholarly documents formatted in APA style must have a correct and proper APA Bibliography Format following the set of rules and guidelines provided in APA format manual. Defined as the alphabetical list of all the sources that the researcher used in his work, the Bibliography is an important component of any research paper for two important reasons.
First, it gives the reader the chance to verify the accuracy and veracity of the data and information that the researcher included in his paper. In addition, the readers could find additional information from the sources listed in the research paper. Secondly, through the APA Bibliography format the ideas and theories of other authors were acknowledged and at the same time you spared yourself from the issue of plagiarism.
For the proper compilation and documentation of your sources, follow these steps of APA Bibliography Format.
1. For the bibliography section or reference list, use a separate page apart from the text. Take note that your bibliography is not the same with the reference list since these two are different from each other. Decide which of them you will use in your paper. The reference list is different from the bibliography since the latter includes all the sources and references that the researcher cited in his manuscript. While the bibliography contains all the sources that have been discarded due to irrelevance or outdated.
2. List your sources alphabetically based on the last name of the author. According to the latest edition of APA format manual, you can list up to 7 author’s name while more than that you can list the first 6 to be followed by a period, a comma or am ellipsis and then the name of the author.
3. To list a source, write the last name of the author and first initials using a comma to separate the initials and the name and a period right after the initials.
4. List the publication date inside a parenthesis right after the name of the author with a period after the closing parenthesis.
5. When listing the article’s title, the first word of the title should be capitalized unless the succeeding words are proper nouns. End your article title listing with a period.
6. Italicized the title of the book or journal followed by a period. Only the first word of the title is capitalize unless the succeeding words are proper nouns.
7. List the place where the book was published followed by the publisher’s name using a colon to separate them.
8. The first line of every entry must be indented (a hanging indent).
