Citing and Referencing (APA): Books and book sections

Structure: Author, A. (Year). Title. Place of Publication: Publisher

Example: Whitworth, A. (2009). Information obesity. Oxford, England: Chandos.

How do I do this using the referencing tools in Word:

What is this?

A book section is not just a chapter of any book. Only books, such as anthologies or edited books - where different chapters are written by different authors and pulled together by an editor - should be referenced as book sections. If you use several different chapters by different authors, then reference each one as a different book section.

For example, School Librarianship: Past, Present and Future, edited by Susan W. Alman contains a chapter entitled "A Brief Look at the Development of School Libraries in the United States" by Ann Carlson Weeks and Diane L. Barlow. If I want to cite something from Weeks and Barlow's chapter, then I want to put them as the author, not Alman, so I cite the chapter not the book:

Structure: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of chapter. In B. B. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xxx–xxx). Place of Publication: Publisher.

Example: Weeks, A. C. & Barlow, D. L. (2017). A brief look at the development of school libraries in the United States. In S. W. Alman (Ed.), School librarianship: Past, present and future (pp.51-64). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

How do I do this using the referencing tools in Word?

What is this?

A book that has been reprinted many times, where the original publication date is important - a 'classic' - for example Oliver Twist (Dickens, 1838), Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847) or Die Physiker (Dürrenmatt, 1961). You will probably want to treat most literary works this way, even fairly recent ones like Beloved (Morrison, 1987).

Structure: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of book. Place of Publication: Publisher. (Original work published Year).

Example: Dickens, C. (2020). Oliver Twist. London: Legend Press. (Original work published 1838).

How do I do this using the referencing tools in Word?

In-text citation

From the bibliography entry, you would expect the in-text citation to be (Dickens, 2020), but it is important for your reader to know the original publication date of this work so you need to put BOTH dates:

E.g. "..." (Dickens, 1838/2020, p.?). Or Dickens (1838/2020) writes ...

Word won't generate this for you automatically (but it's not that hard to type when you need to cite this work!). You just need to remember to generate the reference for the bibliography (by inserting one citation with all the details from the "How do I do this using the referencing tools in Word" section above, and then deleting it and typing the citation instead). Once you have inserted the citation once it will appear in your bibliography (even if you delete the actual citation in your work).

Title

The title is written in sentence case for the reference list - that means only use capital letters for the first word and proper nouns (and, oddly as you will see in Book Sections, the first letter after a colon or dash).

Place of publication

This is the city that the book was published in. This is usually found on the copyright page of the book (where you find the date). If several addresses are listed, put the main headquarters (or pick the first one if unsure). If no city is listed, look up the publisher on the internet and put the city their headquarters are in.

Technically the city of publication should be followed by the country (e.g. Oxford, England) unless in the US, when it should be followed by the state code e.g. Lanham, MD (for Maryland). A list of state codes can be found here.

Although this is correct use of APA 6th edition, many people omit the country of publication. Whatever you choose to do, be consistent.