For a breakdown of rules for APA formatting, your go-to source is the APA Style Manual. (This is available to borrow through the Centenary library, and should be available at all times at the reference desk, I believe.) As a secondary route, I highly recommend visiting the Purdue OWL’s APA Formatting and Style Guide. This guide provides examples and explanations for many different source types – journal articles, websites with no author names, online videos, tweets, newspaper articles, etc.

Here, I’m giving you just the basics so you know what to look for.

A citation for a book is one of the two most basic citations. Here is a citation for Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers:

A citation for an online scholarly journal article is the second most basic citation. An example of this kind of source is Deborah Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy”:

Websites are also a type of source that you will most likely be using. The citations for these will vary greatly, since the information you’re able to obtain about each website (e.g. author, publication date, etc.) will vary greatly. Here is an example of a webpage from the online comic The Oatmeal’s website; no date was available, but I know the author’s name and the title of the specific webpage:

Each citation on your annotated bibliography will be different and will require some thought. (E.g. What do you do when your source has more than one author? How do you cite a blog post? What do you do if you’re citing a chapter from a book and not the entire book?) The three examples here provide you with the basics. For more specific examples, see the APA Style Manual or the websites mentioned above.

Using online citation generators to come up with your citations (or relying solely upon the citations given to you in the databases) is something that needs to be thought through. Just as you need to evaluate your sources to make sure that you’re using credible information, you need to make sure that the citation generator you’re using is providing you with credible citation information. If you would like to go down this road, I might suggest using Zotero (a free program that not only can create citations for your work but also keeps track of and organizes your sources). Tools like Zotero (or EndNote or RefWorks) can be confusing to use at times; but they will give you accurate results, and often have excellent step-by-step tutorials available. The Centenary library provides guides to APA citation as well.