APA Reference List Order: How to Alphabetize Every Entry

APA reference list order is alphabetical by the first word of each entry, which is usually the first author's surname, compared letter by letter. That one sentence settles the easy cases. The hard cases are why this guide exists: five works by the same author, two works from the same year, a surname that starts with Mc, a title that starts with a number. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed., 2020) covers all of them in Sections 9.44 to 9.48, and each gets a worked example below.

The official rule for APA reference list order

Section 9.44 of the manual sets the base rule: alphabetize entries by the first word of the reference, letter by letter. For most entries that word is the first author's surname. When a work has no author, the title moves into the author position and you alphabetize by its first significant word.

Three refinements do most of the work:

• Nothing precedes something. A shorter name comes before a longer name that begins with the same letters. Anders, Y. J. precedes Anderson, E. L., because the comparison ends where "Anders" ends. By the same logic, Brown, J. R. precedes Browning, A. F.
• Ignore spaces, punctuation, and anything in parentheses or brackets. "De Silva" alphabetizes as "desilva." Apostrophes vanish for sorting purposes. This rule quietly decides real orderings: De Long, K. sorts after Dean, R., because with the space removed the comparison is "delong" against "dean," and "a" beats "l" at the third letter. A sort that files all the "De" names together as a block is using a different convention than APA's.
• Never reorder the authors inside an entry. Alphabetization applies between entries. Within a reference, authors stay in the order printed on the work itself, because that order records who contributed most.

The list itself carries the centered label References in bold at the top of a new page, double-spaced, with a 0.5-inch hanging indent on every entry. Alphabetizing a perfectly formatted list and formatting a perfectly alphabetized list are separate jobs; this guide handles the order, and the formatting takes two dialog boxes covered near the end.

Worked examples

1. The base case: different surnames

Four sources, sorted letter by letter by first author surname:

Adichie, C. N. (2014). We should all be feminists. Vintage Books.

Cain, S. (2012). Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking. Crown Publishers.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen eighty-four. Secker & Warburg.

No surprises yet. The surname decides everything, and the given-name initials never enter the comparison unless two surnames match exactly.

2. Nothing precedes something

Anders, Y. J. (2021). ...

Anderson, E. L. (2018). ...

Alphabetically minded students expect "Anderson" first because "o" is deep in the alphabet and feels early. The rule says otherwise: "Anders" runs out of letters, and a name that ends is treated as coming before any continuation of it. The year is irrelevant here; dates only matter when the authors are identical.

3. Several works by the same author

One author, four works. The order is chronological, with two bookends the manual is specific about: works with no date come first, and works in press come last.

López, T. (n.d.). ...

López, T. (2019). ...

López, T. (2023). ...

López, T. (in press). ...

Repeat the author's name in full for every entry. APA does not use dashes or ditto marks in place of a repeated name. If one of your sources genuinely has no date, the entry itself follows the rules in our guide to citing a source with no date in APA 7; ordering it is the easy part.

4. One author, then the same author with co-authors

Kim, J. (2024). ...

Kim, J., & Osei, P. (2020). ...

The single-author entry comes first even though it is newer. The manual's principle is that a lone author precedes any multi-author team led by that author, and the publication years only break ties within each group. Sorting these two by date is one of the most common ordering errors in submitted papers, partly because word processors sort them that way by default.

5. Same first author, different co-authors

Torres, M. R., & Ahmed, S. (2022). ...

Torres, M. R., & Lindqvist, S. (2019). ...

When the first author is shared, the second author's surname decides the order (Ahmed before Lindqvist), and the third decides if the first two are shared, and so on down the byline. Again the years do nothing: 2022 lands above 2019 because A lands above L. How the authors themselves are formatted inside each entry, including the 20-author cutoff, is covered in our guide to citing multiple authors in APA 7.

6. Same author, same year

Two 2020 works by the same author cannot be told apart by "(López, 2020)," so Section 9.47 assigns lowercase letters:

López, T. (2020a). Alphabetization in practice. ...

López, T. (2020b). Sorting the works cited page. ...

The letters follow the alphabetical order of the titles, ignoring "A," "An," and "The" at the start. Assign them in the reference list first, then use the matching year-letter pair in text: (López, 2020a). Students often assign the letters in the order the works are cited in the paper; that is the wrong direction, and it produces citations that point at the wrong entry. Undated works by the same author take the same letters with a hyphen: (López, n.d.-a) and (López, n.d.-b).

7. Mc, Mac, and M'

Alphabetize these prefixes exactly as they are spelled. Library card catalogs once filed "Mc" as if it were "Mac"; APA does not.

MacArthur, D. (2015). ...

Macquarie, L. (2018). ...

McAdam, R. (2012). ...

McBeth, F. (2021). ...

MacArthur precedes McAdam because the second letter settles it: "a" before "c." The apostrophe in M'Carthy is ignored per the punctuation rule, so it sorts as "mcarthy."

8. A title that starts with a number

When a no-author entry begins with a numeral, alphabetize it as though the number were spelled out. A report titled 10 ways to fund a graduate degree sorts under T, as "Ten ways," and sits nowhere near the top of the list. The same logic would place a work cited by the bare title 1984 under N, for "Nineteen eighty-four." Word processors get this one wrong every time, which is worth remembering before trusting an automatic sort.

Special cases

No author at all

Move the title into the author position, then alphabetize by the first significant word, skipping "A," "An," and "The." The elements of legal style sorts under E. The article "A survey of citation habits" sorts under S. The skipped word still appears in the entry; it just does not count for sorting. Building the entry itself is its own topic, covered in our guide to citing a source with no author in APA 7.

A work signed "Anonymous"

This is a different case from a missing author. If the work is actually bylined "Anonymous," the entry begins with the word Anonymous and alphabetizes under A as though Anonymous were a real surname. Use it only when it appears on the work; an unsigned webpage is a no-author source, and its title leads.

Two first authors with the same surname

Different people, same surname: alphabetize their entries by first initials.

Jobson, B. T. (2015). ...

Jobson, C. (2000). ...

The initials also follow the citations into your text, placed before the surname: (B. T. Jobson, 2015) and (C. Jobson, 2000). Without them a reader cannot tell which Jobson study your sentence leans on.

Group authors

Government agencies, associations, and organizations alphabetize by the first significant word of their full official name. The American Psychological Association sorts under American, and "The Sutton Trust" sorts under Sutton. Write out the full name in the reference even if your text uses an abbreviation; the reference list never leads with an acronym.

Surnames with particles: de, van, von, La

The manual's ordering machinery is letter by letter, but which letters start the surname depends on the name itself. APA's working principle is to follow the form the author uses: if the particle is presented as part of the surname (De Silva, T.), alphabetize from the particle, under D. There is genuine variation in how individual authors and publishers treat these names, so when your sources disagree, match the form printed on the work you are citing and apply it consistently across the list.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Sorting same-author works by title, or newest first. Within one author, the order is chronological, oldest first, with n.d. leading and in press trailing. Reverse chronology belongs on a CV.
• Alphabetizing "The Lancet" under T. Skip "A," "An," and "The" when a title or group name leads the entry. This is the single most common error an automatic sort leaves behind.
• Assigning 2020a and 2020b by citation order. The letters come from the alphabetical order of the titles in the reference list. Fix the list first; the in-text letters follow.
• Filing Mc as Mac. The old telephone-directory convention lingers in muscle memory. APA sorts the letters actually present.
• Reordering authors within an entry. A reference for Zhang, Adams, and Murphy starts with Zhang if that is the printed byline. Author order is data about the work; only the entries move.
• Trusting the A-Z button completely. A word processor sort is a first pass. It will misplace numerals, "n.d.," "in press," and single-author entries that should precede multi-author ones. The next section covers what to fix by hand.

Sorting automatically in Word and Google Docs

In Microsoft Word, select the finished reference list, stay on the Home tab, and click the A-Z sort button. Leave "Sort by" set to Paragraphs and Text, and click OK. The list snaps into alphabetical order, and for a typical undergraduate list of ten to twenty distinct authors, that is ninety percent of the job. While the list is still selected, the same Paragraph dialog that holds the hanging indent also sets line spacing to Double, which the reference page requires, so both fixes take one visit.

Google Docs has no built-in A-Z sort for paragraphs. The practical routes are a sorting add-on from the Workspace Marketplace, or pasting the list into Google Sheets, sorting the column, and pasting it back. Either way, re-apply the hanging indent afterward: in Word it lives in the Paragraph dialog under Special, set to Hanging at 0.5 inches, and in Docs under Format, then Align & indent, then Indentation options.

One thing neither tool threatens: sorting entries never breaks the link between your in-text citations and the list. The citation (Kahneman, 2011) finds its entry by author and year, wherever that entry sits, so you can re-sort as often as you add sources.

Then walk the sorted list once and fix what the machine cannot know:

1. Entries starting with numerals belong where the spelled-out number sorts.
2. "A," "An," and "The" at the start of no-author titles must be skipped manually.
3. Same-author stacks need the n.d.-first, in-press-last order and the single-author-first rule.
4. Same author, same year needs its a and b letters checked against title order.

Five minutes of manual checking on top of the automatic sort is faster and safer than either alone.

Quick-reference table