Book references are among the most common types of references students create when putting together research papers for the APA 7th Edition.

While most book references are relatively straightforward, there are many places where students can get tripped up. The most common errors involve sentence-casing the book’s title and using the correct punctuation in the reference itself.

Let’s take a look at the four main parts of a book reference, some special cases for names and dates, and a correctly formatted example.

The basic formula for book references

A basic book reference includes four parts: an author part, date part, title part, and a source part. Each part is separated by a period, but they might also have their own individual styling and punctuation.

Organizing the four parts of a standard book reference in APA 7

Author part. (Date part). Title part. Source part.

1. Author part
   List the authors of the work, inverting the name so the last name comes first, followed by the first and middle name initials. Use periods after initials with a space between the initials for first and middle names. Add suffixes at the end of the name after another comma (for example, Jr., III). Omit degrees and titles. As an example, the author John Meldrum would be formatted as "Meldrum, J."
2. Date part
   For books, the date should be the most recent year of publication for the work. Place the year in parentheses, followed by a period: (2007). If no year is available for the work, use (n.d.).
3. Title part
   Italicize the full title. Use sentence case, capitalizing only the first word of the title and subtitle, and any proper nouns. Note that the period at the end of the title should not be italicized.
   Example: Sasquatch: Legend meets science.
4. Source part
   Provide the publisher name only. City and state are not required in APA 7. Keep words like Press or Books when part of the name; omit corporate suffixes such as Inc. or LLC. If the author and the publisher are the same, omit the publisher to avoid repetition.
   Example: Forge Books.

Pro Tip

APA 7 requires you to create references based on their original format, not the format you read it in. In other words, if you read a book on the web, you’d still format the reference as a book, not a webpage.

Following the four steps in the list above, your final book reference should look like this:

Meldrum, J. (2007) Sasquatch: Legend meets science. Forge Books.

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Creating a book reference with PERRLA

The easiest way to create a book reference with PERRLA is to simply input the book’s ISBN. PERRLA will then handle all the heavy lifting – automatically importing the reference parts and adding the properly formatted reference to your reference page with the correct italics, spacing, punctuation, and hanging indent.

But if the ISBN isn’t readily available, PERRLA can still create a perfect book reference, even those that don’t follow the standard formula. What if it’s a translated work? PERRLA’s got it covered. A book with multiple editors? PERRLA can handle that. A volume in a series? A book wherein a different author wrote each chapter? Or, what if you’re citing an illustrator’s work in a book with a different author? PERRLA can handle all those and more. But don’t just take our word for it. You can try PERRLA completely free for 7 days here (no credit card required)

Until next time, good writing! Coming up soon in the next installment of our APA 101 series, we’ll dive into formatting references for journal articles in APA 7