APA Reference List Generator

How this APA bibliography generator orders the list and assigns year suffixes

Two things about an APA reference list depend on the set as a whole, not on any single entry, so they are worth knowing about before you check the output.

Order. An APA reference list is alphabetical by the first author’s surname, not the order you collected the sources in. Paste your DOIs in whatever order they are sitting in your notes. What comes back is already in final order, so you can drop it straight into the document.

Year suffixes. Two works by the same authors in the same year need 2015a and 2015b to tell them apart. Which one gets a is decided alphabetically by title, as the entries fall in the reference list, so the letter belongs to the pair rather than to either reference on its own. Paste both sources in the same run and the suffixes are worked out across the set. They match the marks produced by the APA in-text citation generator, which assigns them the same way, so the two halves of your document agree.

The et al. rule differs between the two places it shows up, which catches people out. In the reference list, APA 7 names up to 20 authors in full, and only at 21 or more does it give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author. In text, you drop to first author plus et al. at three. Same sources, different thresholds, both applied here.

One limit worth knowing before you start: every entry has to come from an identifier or a reference file. Websites, lectures, and interviews have no record to look up, so those you add by hand once the generated list is pasted in.

Pasting an APA reference list into Word or Google Docs without losing the formatting

An APA reference entry carries real formatting. Journal and book titles are italic. The whole entry takes a hanging indent, first line at the margin and every following line indented half an inch. Plain text carries neither, so a straight copy leaves you italicising and indenting forty entries by hand.

The Copy button puts two versions on the clipboard at once: an HTML version and a plain text version. Word and Google Docs take the HTML one, so italics arrive intact and the hanging indent is already applied. A plain text editor takes the other, so you are not pasting markup into a .tex file. You do not pick, the application takes whichever it can handle.

If you are working in LaTeX rather than Word, you probably want the .bib file instead of formatted references. The DOI to BibTeX converter takes the same inputs and hands back BibTeX entries for your bibliography, and natbib or biblatex handles the APA formatting at compile time.