APA generally groups books into two categories:
Books with chapters written by multiple authors are called edited books, because they have one or more editors who recruit other experts to write specific chapters.
For example, the book on the left is an edited book, while the one on the right was written by one person. You can sometimes tell the difference between the two of them if the word "editor/editors or the abbreviation "Ed./Eds." appear on the cover.
It can still be confusing to tell if a book is an edited book or not just by looking at the title. For example, the non-edited book on the right says "Third Edition" which means that this is the third version of this book published, but it could be easy to look at it quick and think that this is an edited book.
It's much more effective to look at the table of contents, because this is where you will see who wrote each chapter. In an edited book, the author(s) for each chapter will be listed. No authors will be listed in the table of contents for a non-edited book.
You will also need to consult the table of contents of an edited book to get all of the information that you need to correctly cite it as this diagram illustrates:
References for a chapter from an edited book contain seven elements: chapter author(s), year, title of chapter, editor(s) name, title of the book, edition (if necessary) and chapter page range, and publisher. If the book has a DOI or a URL, you should include that as well.
These elements can usually be found on the title page or the copyright page and the table of contents. Here is an example that contains all seven elements.
This is how these seven elements would look in a correctly formatted APA edited book chapter citation:
The following sections provide more detail about each element.
Type the name of the chapter author in inverted (last name first) format.
If a chapter has more than one author, provide all of the authors' names in inverted format, with an ampersand (&) before the last author's name.
Keep the author's names in the same order that they appear in the table of contents.
Type the copyright year of the book in parentheses, followed by a period and a space.
Capitalize the first letter of the first word of the title. If there is a sub-title, which usually appears after a colon, capitalize the first letter of the first word in the sub-title. Do not use italics. Type a period at the end.
Capitalize all proper nouns, e.g. Vermont, if they are in the title regardless of their position.
Type the word In and the initials and the last name of each editor. Do not invert the names. Type (Ed.) if there is only one editor or (Eds.) if there are two or more editors.
Place a comma at the end.
Capitalize the first letter of the first word of the title. If there is a sub-title, which usually appears after a colon, capitalize the first letter of the first word in the sub-title. Format the entire title in italics. Do not place a period at the end.
Capitalize all proper nouns, e.g. Vermont, if they are in the title regardless of their position.
Type in the edition number followed by the abbreviation ed and a period and comma (if necessary). Type the letters pp followed by a period, a space, and the first and last pages of the chapter. Enclose all of this information in parentheses and type a period at the end.
Do not format in italics.
Type the name of the publisher exactly as you see it in the book, followed by a period. Do not include the publisher's location. Do not put the publisher's name in italics.
