Walden University Writing Center

Where instructors and editors talk writing.

By Sarah Prince

Let me propose a brief scenario that might sound familiar to many of you. Although you had initially planned to give yourself ample time to write your paper and format your reference list, you find yourself just hours before your paper is due in a frenzied rush to finish your writing assignment. After finally crafting a paper that you are proud of (or at least think is acceptable), you spend a few hurried minutes creating your reference list. Quickly glancing over your references, you decide that everything looks okay (or at least good enough). You save your paper one last time and get ready to submit your work.

I’m here to tell you to WAIT, PAUSE, HALT, STOP! Before your pointer finger hits send, upload, or submit, I’m suggesting you use these 10 simple tips to make sure your references meet 6th edition APA standards. Taking a little time to clean up some common errors in your reference list could make a big difference in your compliance with APA guidelines and even prevent you from losing unnecessary points on your paper.

1. Insert a page break: You should always insert a formal page break between the body of your text and your reference list. This formal page break will begin your reference list on a new page and keep your text from sliding down the page as you make changes and revisions to your document.

2. Format your reference title correctly: After you have inserted a formal page break, you want the word “References” (“Reference” if you only have used one source) to be centered in plain text (not bolded) at the top of your page. You should not have a colon (“:”) after your reference title.

3. Remove hyperlinks: Make sure to remove all hyperlinks from your reference list by right clicking on the link and selecting “Remove hyperlink.” After doing so, your link should no longer be bright blue and underlined; instead, it will appear in black (like the rest of your draft).

4. Format your references using a hanging indent: Instead of trying to manually create a hanging indent for each reference, you want MS Word to do the work for you! If you change your formatting settings (which I promise is really easy), your citations will remain perfectly indented no matter what revisions you make to your references. For quick help with formatting an automatic hanging indent, check out these tutorials.

5. Capitalize titles correctly: Per APA guidelines, the title’s first word, its first word after a colon (or the first word of a subtitle), and its proper nouns should be the only words capitalized (whether your title is from a book, a journal article, or a website). For example, let’s say I wrote a book. In my reference list, the title would read Sarah Prince: The woman, the hero, the legend. Notice that here, the first word, Sarah, is capitalized, the proper noun Sarah Prince is capitalized, and the first word after the colon, The, is capitalized. All other words remain in lower case.

6. Format titles correctly: Although APA style does not have different rules for the capitalization of titles in books, websites, and journals, it does have different rules for their formatting. Shorter works, such as journal articles and websites, are written in plain text in your reference list. However, longer works, such as books (I recommend the brilliant read above) and entire journals are italicized.

7. Find the DOI or URL: Per 6th edition APA guidelines, you should actually include a DOI (instead of database retrieval information) when citing journal articles found online. If no DOI can be found, you should then use the URL of the journal’s home page. In other words, if you are glancing at your reference page, and you see “Retrieved from Ebscohost,” chances are you need to take a look at our resource on reference entries for electronic sources.

8. Include publication information: If you are citing a print resource such as a book (like the brilliant one I’ve suggested above), you will want to include the city and the state postal code abbreviation in addition to the publisher. For instance, your publication information will look something like this: Atlanta, GA: Home Publishing Press. A common misstep is to leave off the state abbreviation or to fail to abbreviate it. If you are unsure, check out this list of state postal code abbreviations.

9. Use correct punctuation: When in a rush, it is very easy to look over missing or misplaced periods in your reference list. For most citations, you’ll just need to follow the simple rules below; however make sure to check out this APA Style Blog post for trickier sources.
• Periods should be inserted after the author name(s), date (which goes inside parentheses), title, and source.
• Periods should NOT be inserted after DOIs or URLs in reference list entries.

10. Double space your reference list: Your reference list should be double spaced, and it should not have any extra spaces between individual citations. Just like formatting your hanging indent, automatically double spacing your paper (including your reference list) can save you a lot of time and work. For more help on formatting double spacing, see these tutorials

So, before you click submit, go through this checklist to see if your reference list is up to code. And, if you still have questions, see the reference list in our course paper template or check out these common reference examples.

By Melanie Brown, Dissertation Editor and Writing Faculty Member

Note: This post has been updated per APA 7.

If you have written even one APA reference list—and if you have been a Walden student for more than a few weeks, chances are good that you have—then you have probably read about the DOI. What is this mysterious DOI? Some people say the letters individually (dee-oh-eye); others say doy (rhymes with joy or poi or “APA style leaves me an-noy-ed”).

DOI: What Is It?
A DOI is a digital object identifier—a fancy way of describing the unique number assigned to an electronic source. This number helps researchers locate a particular journal article quickly and efficiently. If a DOI has been assigned to a journal article you are citing, then you must include that number in your reference list.

I can hear your questions now:

Savvy Student: “Wait a minute. I have 50 sources in my reference list. Do I have to include DOIs for all of them?”

Gentle Editor: “Only for electronic sources, such as journal articles you read in full-text or .pdf form.”

Savvy Student: “Wait another minute. Most of my sources are journal articles that I read in full-text or.pdf form. How do I know whether those 50 or 100 sources have DOIs?”

Gentle Editor: “Yes, all journal articles accessed online with a DOI number must include a DOI in your references”

Savvy Student: “Most of my sources are journal articles accessed online. How do I know whether those 50 or 100 sources have DOIs?”

Gentle Editor: “The DOI may already be listed wherever you find your source, so look through the source listing and try the auto-cite feature (if there is one) to see if a DOI comes up. If you're still unable to find one, check Crossref.org.”

Savvy Student: "Look, Editor. I know you're trying to help,  but I don't have much time to tinker with my reference list. Is Crossref.org easy to use?"

Gentle Editor: "You beth it is. Follow the simple steps below!"

DOI: How Do I Find It?
At Crossref.org, researchers can look up DOI numbers for online journal articles. Here’s how to use it:

1. Go to the Guest Query form (free DOI lookup) on Crossref.org.

2. Scroll down to "Search on Article Title." Type the first author's name and the article title in the appropriate boxes and then click search. If your article has a DOI, it will appear. Voila! Thank you, Crossref.org.

Note: If you need to locate many DOIs at the same time, it might be easier for you to use Crossref.org's Simple Text Query, which Anne outlines in her Tech Tip post.

DOI: How Do I Put It Into My Reference List?
Now that you have found a DOI for one of your journal articles, you have to include it in your reference list.

If Crossref.org showed the DOI as http://dx.doi.org/10.mlb/34.75329xp, it would look like this in a (fictional) reference:

Brown, M. (2011). Finding a DOI is not so hard after all. Journal for DOI Studies, 11, 9-14. https://doi.org/10.mlb/34.75329xp

Note that if you found your doi via the Walden University Library's "cite" feature, it will look something like this: https://doi-org.ezp.waldenlibrary.org/10.mlb... You need to eliminate the extra Walden Library information and have a simple doi.org/10, otherwise your reader will have to be a Walden student to gain access to the article.

What if there is no DOI when I search?

In that case, you will follow some slightly different steps to include retrieval information for your reader. Review our Citing Electronic Sources webpage for more guidance. You can also find help with reference list formatting in APA style (Reference List Examples)! Happy DOI hunting!

By Annie Pezalla, Dissertation Editor

Many students who see us in the Writing Center worry about using first person in their writing. They’ve been trained into “I-less-ness” through their previous classes or in their work with other instructors who have told them that using "I" will make their paper sound weak or subjective. Instead of writing, for example, that “I conducted interviews with participants,” students are told to write, “interviews were conducted with participants”—thereby removing the "I" from the phrase. And they’ve had good reason to practice this stance. Scholarly writing is generally about emphasizing the findings from empirical research, not the person (or people) who conducted the analyses or discovered those findings. Less emphasis, then, has traditionally been given to the "I" in scholarly writing.

But times they are a-changin’. There’s been a growing movement in social science research for greater transparency in our actions as researchers. This movement has been tied to a thing called the “observer effect,” which speaks to the power of our actions on the research findings we generate. This movement has also been linked to the importance of owning our actions for ethical reasons. This stance makes a lot of sense. I mean, is it really honest to act like “interviews were conducted” by some invisible being? Are we being ethical if we fail to disclose our actions in recruiting, interacting with, and compensating participants? Not really.

To present your research in the most transparent way, Walden University and the 6th edition of the APA manual (p. 69) recommend the use of first person in scholarly writing: I collected the data, I conducted analyses, I sought Institutional Review Board approval, and so on. First person voice usually provides the most concise and precise way of describing research processes, findings, and implications. It’s a lot more precise, for example, to write that “I scheduled a meeting with each consenting participant to discuss the study,” rather than “Meetings were scheduled with each consenting participant to discuss the study.” The latter phrase is convoluted, and leaves the reader wondering, “Who scheduled the meetings?” and “Who discussed the study?” The use of first person can limit those questions.

Of course, it should be said that first person should be used wisely. "I" should not appear in every sentence of your manuscript. “I did this” and “I did that” can sound forced and narcissistic. “I” should also not be used to express an opinion about the worth of other scholars' findings (e.g., “I thought this study was boring”). Instead, “I” should only appear in places where anthropomorphic writing might appear (e.g., instead of writing, “This chapter will explain…” write “In this chapter, I will explain…”) and where your presence is as equally important as is the content you are presenting (e.g., when describing the potential impact of your presence on the collection and interpretation of your findings). In any other context of your paper—such as when you are presenting the findings from past literature—“I-less-ness” should generally be practiced.

By Jamie Patterson, Dissertation Editor

There are fewer and fewer of us in the world who carried, loved, and knew the APA Manual fifth edition. You might recognize it on your shelf: red, black, and neglected. When the APA publication committee shifted to the sixth edition (blue, bright, and lovely), it made several changes. In addition to saying adios to the student section (the section that provided the loophole for single-spaced block quotes and reference lists), mention of how to format with a typewriter, and all-caps headings, the sixth edition is really quite readable.

Seriously.

Although it is absolutely possible to sit down and read the sixth edition cover to cover—particularly the early chapters—I realize that most writers sure don’t do this. So as someone who spends at least 8 hours a day with the book in hand, let me point you toward some of the more often visited pages. Even if you just read these few pages, you’ll start to understand the manual a bit more and it might actually be useful to you.

First, let me start by suggesting using the Internet for reference list entries. They’re all in the book (pp. 198-224), but you can also Google an entry or check out our website. Rely on the manual for these issues:

1. Heading levels: p. 62
2. When to use past tense: p. 78
3. Comma use: pp. 88-89
4. How to use hyphens: pp. 99-100
5. When to use a numeral and when to spell out a number: pp. 111-114
6. In-text citations: p. 177

So pull out your book and mark these six little spots. If you can master these elements, your writing will be polished and that much more ready for final review and publication.

One last piece of advice is to pay extremely close attention to APA p. 191 on DOIs. This might not be the most intuitive portion of the manual, so check out our webpage on the topic and let me loosely interpret: If you retrieve an article from a database, you must (absolutely must) show how you accessed the article by including a DOI or the URL for the journal or database. As a dissertation editor, I’ve seen documents at form and style that were in need of this access information for all entries. If you can collect the DOI for each article as you write, this will be the single most important time-saving step you make.

That, and becoming familiar with sixth edition, of course.

By Matt Smith, Writing Consultant

In my previous blog post, I focused on software that can help you generate, record, and organize your ideas during the prewriting phase of a writing project, whether you’re working on a short personal essay or a massive scholarly paper. Those programs can be incredibly helpful as you create your early drafts, but using them when you’re tweaking your final drafts—refining your language to make it more concise, for example, or making sure that each topic or subtopic in your paper has its own paragraph—is a bit like swinging an ax instead of tapping a chisel: Some tools are meant for felling and chopping, while some are meant for shaping and sculpting. In this post, I’ll focus on some tools that can help you polish your text in the final stages of the writing process.

The most indispensable of these finishing tools is also probably the least exciting—Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker (discussed more in-depth here). Grammar and spelling (often simply called mechanics), while minor compared to big-picture concerns like organization and tone, have a powerful effect on your readers overall, and correcting mechanical issues is usually one of the easiest and most noticeable improvements you can make in revision. (Think of them as the fasteners that hold your paper together: One or two loose nails or missing screws won’t do much harm, but if too many are misused or absent, you’ll have a pile of assorted lumber instead of a wall, a bookshelf, or a cabinet.) Be careful, however, not to rely on this function too heavily—the exact meaning, after all, is tricky for even the smartest program to discern, and Word will occasionally misread your writing.

Speaking of built-in Word features, you can also use the Find/Replace function (press Control + F to open it) during revision to make your writing more concise. In early drafts, many writers—myself included, shamefully—tend to use two or even three words, usually adjectives, when they only need one to convey their meaning. While searching for all of these redundant words manually would test the patience of a monk, they’re most often connected by the conjunction and, so you can usually find a phrase with redundant words, such as examine and inspect the theories of Vygotsky, by searching for and and eliminating the extra words (in this case, by deleting and inspect).

Concision, of course, operates alongside diction (also called word choice), another important element of writing style, and diction’s effect on your readers is subtle but significant. While always and often may seem to have similar enough meanings for casual conversation (the grocery store is always out of my favorite peanut butter isn’t too far off from the grocery store is often out of my favorite peanut butter), in scholarly writing the difference between always and often can determine whether your research findings are lauded as revolutionary in your field or dismissed as misleading hyperbole. Luckily, you can use Wordle to eliminate overused words that could be easily misinterpreted (such as always). When you upload your text to Wordle, it creates a word cloud, or an arrangement of the words that appear most often in your writing scaled according to their frequency—that is, the most-used words are larger, while the less-used ones are smaller. If any of the larger words have especially strong or broad meanings, you can use the Find/Replace feature in Word to find them and replace them with more descriptive, nuanced words. Wordle can also help you vary your use of phrases that are repetitive but otherwise harmless. For example, you might not realize, during the drafting of your paper, that you’ve used the phrase Department of Health and Human Services 27 times in your seven-page paper until you see it in a Wordle cloud in a 64-point font.

While the issues I’ve covered so far are all vital qualities of writing that you need to consider when you revise your work, occasionally you’ll want to make major structural readjustments to your paper’s organization instead of focusing on these comparatively minor issues of style. Even if you begin your paper with a detailed outline built on crystalline logic, some measure of chaos inevitably creeps in as you write. For example, it may have taken you three paragraphs to adequately address a topic when you thought it would take only two, or you might have had far less material to include in a section than you initially planned. The result is often a paper full of interesting, thoughtful, yet disorganized ideas. At the Writing Center, we often recommend that students use a technique called reverse outlining to address their papers’ organization as they revise. As the name implies, reverse outlining consists of going through your paper and noting the topic of each paragraph, usually on a note card or Post-it; reorganizing these topics into an outline that makes clear, logical sense; and applying this new structure to your paper.

Reverse outlining can be a bit time-consuming, but there are a few software tools to make it faster and simpler. The word-processing and project-management program Scrivener has the most innovative implementation of this feature currently available. Scrivener’s Corkboard allows you to rearrange note cards on a virtual corkboard, and each note card represents a particular portion of your text. For example, if you move the note card titled “Impact of Piaget’s theories on contemporary psychology” so that it comes after the card titled “Introduction of Piaget,” Scrivener will actually move the text of the “Impact of Piaget’s theories…” section so that it comes after the text of the “Introduction…” section. Of course, you’ll still need to make minor adjustments to your text, such as tweaking your transitions, but this can save you a great deal of time overall in revision. (Note: Scrivener is currently only available on Macs, though there is a Windows version in development.) You can also use programs like PNotes or Word’s Outline View feature to reverse-outline your paper, though you’ll need to rearrange the text in your document manually.

Though these tools are by no means exhaustive—they can only supplement good writing practices and skills, not replace them—they can be a huge help as you enter the final stages of producing a finished discussion post, reflection paper, KAM, or dissertation. Revision is, quite literally, the process of seeing your writing again, and if nothing else these tools can help you to see, and refine, aspects of your work that weren’t yet apparent in your earlier drafts.