Reference list

A list of references is included at the end of the text. It must contain a full bibliographic record of the sources used, by which the sources can be identified and traced.

A reference list entry should contain four basic elements: author, date, title, source. The specific form of the citation entry in the bibliography is based on the rules described in the APA Publication Manual 7th ed. and depends on the type of document being cited. Examples and the procedure for creating citation records can be found in the practical examples, more about the elements of reference list entries can be found on APA Style web pages.

The list of references used contains only documents that are also cited in the text of the thesis. Therefore, each work in the list of references should be mentioned in the text in some way (for example, in the form of a general paraphrase). It is not possible to simply “take inspiration” from a work, mentioning it in the reference list but not citing it in the text of the thesis.

There are a few exceptions to this rule which are described in more detail in the section dedicated to specific in-text citations. These are:

  • Citation of personal communication where in-text citation is sufficient, and there is no need to create an entry in the reference list.
  • Secondary citation where only the secondary source is cited in the reference list.
  • Mention of a website, journal, software, application or service, where the source is identified only in italics and is not further described or cited, so there is no need to create an entry for it in the reference list.

Ordering of entries in the reference list

  1. Alphabetically by the surname of the author of the cited document (name of the organisation, etc.).
  2. In the case of a matching surname, we follow the initial; if the initial is identical, the record is sorted according to the year of publication.
  3. If the author is identical, the order of publication is by year, with older works preceding newer ones.
  4. If the author and the year of publication are the same, lower-case letters are added to the year of publication in alphabetical order (e.g. 2000a, 2000b). These lower-case letters must also be included in the in-text citation bracket, so that both parts of the citation are connected.