The entries in the reference list are usually arranged in alphabetical order by the last name of the first author listed on the source, which is usually inverted (last name first).
When ordering several works by the same author, the entries are arranged by year of publication, the earliest first.
Group authors, such as organization or associations, are alphabetized by the first significant word of the name.
If there is no author, move the title in the author position, then alphabetize by the first significant word of the title (skip the articles the, a, an).
The following information applies to all kinds of sources.
When you cite a work by one single author, list the author's last name followed by the first name.
Last name, First name.
Bryfonski, Dedria.
When you cite a work by two or three authors, list the names in the order they appear in the original source. Invert only the first name, follow it with the second and the third author in normal order. The last author is preceded by and.
Last name, First name, and First name Last name.
Jansen, Marius B., and Gilbert Rozman.
For a book with four or more authors, include all the authors in the reference entry following the same rule as for two or three authors. In the text, only the first last name is cited followed by et al. (Latin abbreviation that means "and others").
Last name, first name, First name Last name, First name Last name, and First name Last name.
Chatenoud Lau, Eva Negri, Carlo La Vecchia, O. Volpato, and S. Franceschi.
(Chatenoud et al. 2000)
When you cite a work by a group author (organization, institution, etc.), spell out the full name of the group author.
Group as Author.
Council on Foreign Affairs.
When you cite a work whose author is not identified, move the title of the source to the author position, before the publication date.
Title of source. Publication date.
"A Game of Dare: Confronting Intolerance in Pakistan." 2016, March 5.
In a reference to an edited book, place the editors' names in the author position followed by the abbreviation ed. or eds.
Last name, First name, ed.
LeGates, Richard T., and Frederic Stout, eds.
When you cite two or more sources by the same author, the entries are arranged by publication year, the earliest first. A 3-m dash replace the name for the successive entries.
Last name, First name. Earliest Year.
---. Latest Year.
Herzfeld, Micahel. 2009.
---. 2010.
When you cite two or more sources by the same author that are published in the same year, the entries are arranged in alphabetical order by title, and lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.) are placed immediately after the publication year.
Last name, First name. Yeara. ATitle...
---. Yearb. BTitle...
Herzfeld, Michael. 2009a. Evicted from Eternity ...
---. 2009b. The Performance of Secrecy ...
In general, an entry in the reference list should include the following components:
For authors or editors, follow the rules listed on this page.
The publication date is always the second element of the entry and is enclosed in parentheses. The date is usually the year of publication, but for magazines and newspaper the exact date is required (year, month and day). If no date is available, write n.d. in parentheses.
Capitalize only the first word of the title and of the subtitle in article or chapter titles. Titles of longer works, such as books and periodicals, are italicized.
If other information is required for the identification and retrieval of the source, it can be added in brackets immediately after the title (i.e. [Audio podcast], [Motion picture], etc.).
Proper formatting of the titles allows the reader to easily identify the type of source.
Titles in quotation marks are part of bigger works. In this category we can find articles, chapters, essays, poems, web documents, videos.
Titles in italics are self-contained and independent, such as books and journals, but also anthologies.
To avoid unnecessary repetition when citing multiple essays or works from a collection, such as an anthology or a reader, you can use the so-called cross-references.
With cross-references you give the full entry of the anthology, and then you give abbreviated entries for the essays/works that are used from the anthology itself.
Fishman, Robert. (1987) 2011. "Beyond Suburbia: The Rise of the Technobub." In LeGates and Stout, 75-83.
Harvey, David. (1997) 2011. "Contested Cities: Social Process and Spacial Form." In LeGates and Stout, 230-237.
LeGates, Richard T., and Frederic Stout, eds. 2011. The City Reader. London: Routledge.
In these examples the two essays have two years of publication because they have been reprinted. The first year of publication is given in parentheses. The parentheses are rendered as square brackets in the in-text citations.