APA, MLA or Chicago? How to Format a Reference (with Examples)

Nearly every student meets the same problem: the essay is finished, and then comes the reference list. APA, MLA and Chicago all ask for the same facts about a source (who, what, when, where), but they arrange and punctuate them differently. This guide shows the same three sources in each style so you can see the pattern, then lists the details that most often go wrong.

Which style should you use?

Your instructor, journal or publisher decides. As a rule of thumb:

• APA (7th edition) is used in psychology, education, nursing and many social sciences.
• MLA (9th edition) is used in English, languages and the humanities.
• Chicago (17th edition) is used in history, many humanities fields and book publishing.

If nobody tells you, pick one and use it consistently.

A journal article in three styles

The source: an article by five authors, published in 2019 in volume 8, issue 3 of a journal, pages 207 to 217, with a DOI.

• APA: Grady, J. S., Her, M., Moreno, G., Perez, C., & Yelinek, J. (2019). Emotions in storybooks: A comparison of storybooks that represent ethnic and racial groups in the United States. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 8(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000185
• Chicago: Weinstein, Joshua I. "The Market in Plato's Republic." Classical Philology 104 (2009): 439–58.
• MLA: Bagchi, Alaknanda. "Conflicting Nationalisms: The Voice of the Subaltern in Mahasweta Devi's Bashai Tudu." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 15, no. 1, 1996, pp. 41-50.

(These examples follow the sample entries published in each style's guide.)

A book in three styles

• APA: Jackson, L. M. (2019). The psychology of prejudice: From attitudes to social action (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000168-000
• MLA: Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New Directions, 1960.
• Chicago: Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.

A web page in three styles

• APA: Fagan, J. (2019, March 25). Nursing clinical brain. OncologyNurseAdvisor.com. https://www.oncologynurseadvisor.com/home/departments/nursing-clinical-brain/
• MLA: Lundman, Susan. "How to Make Vegetarian Chili." eHow, Demand Media, 6 Oct. 2010, www.ehow.com/how_10727_make-vegetarian-chili.html.
• Chicago: "Google Privacy Policy." Privacy & Terms. Google. March 1, 2020. https://policies.google.com/privacy.

The details that trip people up

• Author names. APA uses the family name and initials (Jackson, L. M.). MLA and Chicago use the full given names for the first author (Duncan, Robert).
• More than one author. APA joins with an ampersand; MLA lists two authors and uses "et al." for three or more; Chicago lists up to ten.
• Capitalization. APA uses sentence case for titles of articles and books (only the first word and proper nouns capitalized). MLA and Chicago use title case.
• Italics. Book titles, journal names and website names are italicized in all three styles, and article titles are in quotation marks in MLA and Chicago.
• No author. APA moves the title to the front of the entry, and MLA and Chicago begin with the title.
• No date. APA and Chicago write n.d. (no date). MLA leaves the date out and may add the date you accessed the page.
• Web addresses. APA and Chicago print the full URL; MLA prints it without "https://".

Let the tool do the punctuation

Type the facts once into the Citation Generator and it produces the APA, MLA and Chicago versions side by side, handles author order and initials, and keeps the italics when you copy it into Word or Google Docs. Enter titles in the capitalization your style expects; the tool does not change capital letters for you.

After the citations are done, check the rest of the paper: the Grammar Checker catches spelling and common mistakes, the Word Counter confirms the length, and the Paraphrasing Tool helps you reword your own repetitive sentences. Ideas taken from a source still need a citation even when the words are yours.