How to write a reference list for a paper or report

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A reference answers five questions about a source: who made it, when, what it is called, where it appeared, and how a reader gets back to it. That is the whole content of a reference. APA, MLA, IEEE, Chicago and Vancouver all carry those same five pieces — they disagree only about the order, the punctuation, and whether the marker in your text is a name or a number.

So the work is not memorising templates. It is two steps: find out which style you are being marked against, then copy the right pattern for the source you have.

Start from the style you are required to use

Find the rule you will actually be judged by — the course handout, the journal’s submission guidelines, your department’s thesis regulations. A flawless APA list earns nothing when the department wanted IEEE numbers.

If nothing specifies one, follow your field: APA (7th ed., 2020) in psychology and the social sciences; MLA (9th ed., 2021) in the humanities; IEEE (the IEEE Reference Guide, 2025) in engineering and computer science; Vancouver (the NLM/ICMJE style) in medicine; Chicago (18th ed., 2024) in history. Those are the current versions as of August 2026. Then hold to it — a consistent list in a defensible style beats an inconsistent one in the correct style.

Every reference is the same five pieces

Question	Journal article	Book	Web page
Who	authors	author, or editor	author, or the organisation
When	year	year of that edition	date posted or updated
What	article title	book title	page title
Where	journal, volume, issue, pages	publisher, edition	site name
How to get back	DOI	ISBN or publisher	URL and an access date

When a piece is genuinely absent, every style has a substitution rule — APA moves the title into the author slot and writes n.d. for a missing date. Use the rule; do not invent the missing piece.

“References” and “bibliography” are not the same list

Two different lists share the same shelf, and confusing them is the commonest structural mistake in student work.

References / Works Cited — only the sources you actually cited. One-to-one with the citations in your text.
Bibliography / Works Consulted — everything you read, including background you never cited.

APA and IEEE papers carry references; MLA calls the same thing Works Cited; Chicago supports either. Japanese coursework uses one heading for both senses, which is exactly why it is worth asking which is wanted. Absent an instruction, list only what you cited — a reader who cannot tell which entry backs which claim gets nothing from the extra rows.

The in-text citation and the list are one system

Styles fall into two families, and the family decides how the list is ordered.

Name-based (APA, Chicago author-date, MLA). The marker carries a name — plus the year in APA and Chicago, plus the page number in MLA — and the list is alphabetical by first author’s surname.

APA        … cut error rates by 12% (Sato & Lee, 2023).
           narrative form: Sato and Lee (2023) cut error rates …
           quoting directly: (Sato & Lee, 2023, p. 150)
MLA        … cut error rates by 12% (Sato and Lee 150).
Chicago    … cut error rates by 12% (Sato and Lee 2023, 150).

Numeric (IEEE, Vancouver). The marker is a number assigned in order of first appearance, and the list is in number order, not alphabetical.

IEEE       … cut error rates by 12% [1].
           several at once: [1], [3], [4], [5]
           (IEEE writes ranges out; it no longer contracts them to [3]–[5])
Vancouver  … cut error rates by 12% (1).   (some journals want a superscript)

The consequence people trip over: with a numeric style the list cannot be sorted alphabetically, and adding one citation to paragraph two renumbers everything after it. That is the strongest argument for letting software hold the numbering.

Two invariants hold in every style. Every in-text citation has exactly one entry in the list, and — in a references list — every entry is cited at least once.

The formats, by source type

Names, journals, DOIs and URLs below are invented placeholders. Copy the shape, not the content. The patterns follow APA 7th edition, MLA 9th edition, the IEEE Reference Guide (2025), Chicago 18th edition (author-date) and the NLM/ICMJE “Vancouver” style.

Journal article

APA    Sato, H., & Lee, M. (2023). Sleep timing and exam performance in
       first-year undergraduates. Journal of Learning Science, 18(2),
       145–162. https://doi.org/10.5555/jls.2023.0182
MLA    Sato, Haruka, and Minjun Lee. "Sleep Timing and Exam Performance in
       First-Year Undergraduates." Journal of Learning Science, vol. 18,
       no. 2, 2023, pp. 145-62.
IEEE   [1] H. Sato and M. Lee, "Sleep timing and exam performance in
       first-year undergraduates," J. Learn. Sci., vol. 18, no. 2,
       pp. 145–162, 2023, doi: 10.5555/jls.2023.0182.

APA puts the article title in sentence case and italicises the journal name and the volume number — but not the issue number or the pages; MLA uses title case and quotation marks for the article and italicises the journal; IEEE abbreviates the journal name and numbers the entry.

Book

APA    Tanaka, R. (2020). The craft of citation (2nd ed.). Meridian Press.
MLA    Tanaka, Rio. The Craft of Citation. 2nd ed., Meridian Press, 2020.
IEEE   [2] R. Tanaka, The Craft of Citation, 2nd ed. Boston, MA, USA:
       Meridian Press, 2020.

The edition belongs in the reference: between a first and a second edition, the page you cited may not say the same thing.

Chapter in an edited book

APA    Suzuki, K. (2021). Quotation and plagiarism. In J. Moreau & A. Ito
       (Eds.), Research ethics for beginners (pp. 101–130). Meridian Press.
MLA    Suzuki, Ken. "Quotation and Plagiarism." Research Ethics for
       Beginners, edited by Jean Moreau and Aya Ito, Meridian Press, 2021,
       pp. 101-30.
IEEE   [3] K. Suzuki, "Quotation and plagiarism," in Research Ethics for
       Beginners, J. Moreau and A. Ito, Eds., Boston, MA, USA: Meridian
       Press, 2021, pp. 101–130.

The usual error is citing the whole book when you used one chapter by somebody else. The chapter author takes the author slot; the editors move inside.

Web page

APA    National Learning Council. (2024, March 5). Guidance on thesis
       submission. https://example.org/guidance
MLA    "Guidance on Thesis Submission." National Learning Council,
       5 Mar. 2024, example.org/guidance. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.
IEEE   [4] National Learning Council. "Guidance on thesis submission."
       example.org. Accessed: Aug. 7, 2026. [Online].
       Available: https://example.org/guidance

An access date is not decoration — it tells a reader whether a link died or was quietly rewritten. APA asks for one only when the page is designed to change and is not archived; MLA treats it as an optional element, worth adding when the work has no publication date or looks likely to be altered or removed; IEEE’s website pattern carries one as standard, in the form Accessed: Aug. 7, 2026. APA also drops the site name when it would repeat the author, as above.

Thesis or dissertation

APA    Okada, Y. (2022). Attention and note-taking in lecture halls
       [Doctoral dissertation, Northgate University]. Northgate Research
       Repository. https://example.edu/theses/1234
MLA    Okada, Yui. Attention and Note-Taking in Lecture Halls. 2022.
       Northgate U, PhD dissertation.
IEEE   [5] Y. Okada, "Attention and note-taking in lecture halls," Ph.D.
       dissertation, Dept. Educ., Northgate Univ., Boston, MA, USA, 2022.

A thesis is not a journal article: the awarding institution and the degree take the journal’s place.

Chicago (author-date) and Vancouver

Chicago    Sato, Haruka, and Minjun Lee. 2023. "Sleep Timing and Exam
           Performance in First-Year Undergraduates." Journal of Learning
           Science 18 (2): 145–62.
Vancouver  1. Sato H, Lee M. Sleep timing and exam performance in
           first-year undergraduates. J Learn Sci. 2023;18(2):145-62.

Japanese-language sources

Japanese references have their own typographic conventions, and half-applying the English ones is a reliable way to lose marks. Practice varies a lot by field, though, so read the four points below as one widespread convention — the one you meet most often in the humanities — and not as a single national rule:

The name is surname then given name and is not inverted with a comma the way APA and MLA invert Western names. Several authors are joined by a middle dot in this convention; other house styles join them with a comma instead.
Double corner brackets wrap the container — a book title or a journal name. Single corner brackets wrap the part — an article or a chapter title.
Volume, issue and pages may be spelled out with Japanese counters rather than compressed into the 18(2), 145-162 form. The science-side standards go the other way: SIST 02 writes vol. 48, no. 5, p. 407-413, and the Information Processing Society of Japan writes Vol.46, No.9, pp.2269-2278, with no corner brackets at all.
An edited book marks the editor with a suffix character where English writes “(Ed.)”.

雑誌論文    山田太郎「大学生の睡眠時間と学業成績」『学習科学研究』第18巻第2号、
            2023年、145–162頁。
書籍        佐藤花子『引用の作法』第2版、柏木書房、2020年。
書籍の章    鈴木健「引用と剽窃」田中二郎編『研究倫理入門』柏木書房、2021年、
            101–130頁。
Webページ   学習振興会「卒業論文の書式について」https://example.org/format
            （2026年8月7日閲覧）
学位論文    岡田結衣『講義における注意とノートの取り方』北都大学博士論文、2022年。

Two further decisions belong to your guidelines rather than to you: the ordering (syllabary order, or order of appearance), and whether Japanese and non-Japanese sources share one list. In Japan, SIST 02 — a reference standard published by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, whose SIST programme JST closed at the end of March 2012 — is still what many university library guides are built on, and societies such as the Information Processing Society of Japan and IEICE publish their own house style in their author guidelines. Read yours first.

Where reference lists actually go wrong

Punctuation is rarely what costs the mark. These are.

A citation in the text with no entry in the list, or an entry nobody cites. Check the two against each other as a separate pass, once the draft is frozen.
Second-hand citation. You read B, which quotes A, and you cite A. If you have not read A, say so: APA writes (A, 1998, as cited in B, 2020) and lists only B.
A bare URL. A link with no author, title or date is not a reference; where a page has no personal author, the organisation is the author.
A URL where a DOI exists. DOIs are meant to be stable; article URLs are not.
Metadata pasted without reading it. Database and search-engine exports routinely carry an abbreviated journal name, a missing issue number, or initials where a name should be.

Not doing this by hand

Anything that stores the metadata once and formats on demand — Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, Litlas — removes that whole class of transcription error, and re-formats the list the day you discover the guidelines wanted IEEE.

In Litlas, every paper has a Cite panel on its detail page: choose a style and it shows both halves, the in-text citation and the reference entry, ready to copy, and exports that one paper as BibTeX, RIS or CSL-JSON. A whole library or board exports as a single BibTeX file. Inserting a citation from your library while drafting in Litlas’s own editor — rich text or LaTeX — drops in the marker and the reference entry together, so the two cannot drift apart. All of it works on the free plan.

Three limits, before you rely on it:

Five styles only: APA, Chicago (author-date), IEEE, MLA, Vancouver. Chicago’s footnote variant (notes-bibliography) is not there, and neither are the house styles of Japanese societies such as the Information Processing Society of Japan or IEICE. If one of those is mandatory for you, a tool where arbitrary CSL styles can be installed — Zotero, for one — fits better.
Formatting runs in the en-US locale. Connectives like & and et al. come out in English even for a Japanese-language source, and the Japanese corner brackets are not produced for you.
The output is only as good as the stored metadata. A journal article with a DOI is usually complete; a book or thesis you brought in yourself may be missing the publisher or the edition, so read the entry before pasting it.

Which is the general rule, tool or no tool. Software can get the punctuation right. Noticing that the year is wrong is still your job.