APA 7 Citation and Reference-List Cleanup: Before and After

Before: Research on adolescent technology use often reaches conflicting conclusions (Orben and Przybylski 2019). Other studies connect new-media screen time with rising depressive symptoms (Twenge, Joiner, Rogers & Martin, 2018). A susceptibility framework helps explain why average effects can conceal meaningful differences (Valkenburg & Peter 2013).

Audit: APA parenthetical citations require a comma before the year. A two-author work uses an ampersand inside parentheses. A work with three or more authors uses the first author's surname followed by ‘et al.’ from the first citation. Every in-text citation must have one matching reference entry, and every reference entry should be cited in the paper unless the assignment explicitly uses a broader bibliography.

After: Research on adolescent technology use often reaches conflicting conclusions (Orben & Przybylski, 2019). Other studies connect new-media screen time with rising depressive symptoms (Twenge et al., 2018). A susceptibility framework helps explain why average effects can conceal meaningful differences (Valkenburg & Peter, 2013).

The correction standardizes punctuation and author treatment without changing the writer's claims. A full citation audit would also open each source to confirm author order, year, title, journal, volume, issue, page range, and DOI rather than guessing missing metadata.

Corrected references are alphabetized by first-author surname. Article titles use sentence case. Journal title and volume require italics in the formatted document. DOI values should be presented as live https://doi.org/ links when verified.

Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173–182.

Twenge, J. M., Joiner, T. E., Rogers, M. L., & Martin, G. N. (2018). Increases in depressive symptoms, suicide-related outcomes, and suicide rates among U.S. adolescents after 2010 and links to increased new media screen time. Clinical Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–17.

Valkenburg, P. M., & Peter, J. (2013). The differential susceptibility to media effects model. Journal of Communication, 63(2), 221–243.

One-to-one matching: confirm that Orben and Przybylski, Twenge and colleagues, and Valkenburg and Peter appear in both the body and reference list. Metadata verification: check the publisher record or DOI landing page for every journal article. Document formatting: apply double spacing and hanging indents in the final file. Scope control: do not add a DOI, issue number, database name, or page range unless it has been verified from the source.