Ask OASISMethods to the Madness: Title in a Reference Entry
Last updated 5/6/2020
Visual: Screen opens to a background image with a person typing on a laptop and a notebook and pencil, along with the Walden University Writing Center logo. The title Walden University Writing Center and tagline “Your writing, grammar, and APA experts” appears on the screen. The screen changes to show the series title “Methods to the APA Madness” and the video title “Title in a Reference Entry.”
Audio: Guitar music
Visual: Slide changes to image of a citation style in a blue text box that reads:
Oyo, B. & Kalema, B.M. (2014). Massive open online courses for Africa by Africa. International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning, 15(6), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v15i6.1889
- Follows capitalization rule: First word, first word after a colon, and proper nouns
- Sources published as own entity are italicized (books, webpages, DVDs).
Audio: Let’s look at the title element of a reference entry. All titles follow the same capitalization format, which is sentence case. This means that we only capitalize the first word, the first word after a colon, and any proper nouns. And again, that’s the first word, any proper nouns, and, if I had a colon in this title, I would have capitalized the first word after that colon.
The other formatting component for titles is whether to include italics or not. In general, we italicize titles of sources that are published as their own entity. An example of this is a book or a webpage: Those sources stand on their own, not within another source, and so we italicize their titles.
This particular source is a journal article, so we don’t italicize the title because articles are published with other articles as part of a journal issue. Because of this, we don’t need to italicize its title.
Knowing whether to italicize a source’s title takes some practice to learn, so until you get used to whether to use italics or not, we recommend using the examples on the Writing Center website or in the APA Manual. After some practice with reference entries, knowing when to use italics will become second nature.
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