APA Citation Guide (7th Edition)

The American Psychological Association (APA) style is widely used in the social sciences, education, engineering, and business. This guide provides a concise overview of the most common citation formats, referencelist rules, and manuscript basics required for APAformatted papers.

1. General Formatting Rules

Paper size & margins: 8.5 x 11 (letter), 1inch margins on all sides.
Font: 12pt Times New Roman, 11pt Arial, 11pt Calibri, or 10pt Lucida Sans Unicode.
Line spacing: Doublespace the entire document, including references.
Alignment: Leftalign text; do not justify.
Paragraph indentation: First line of each paragraph indented 0.5 inches.
Header: Page number in the topright corner of every page.
Title page: Title, author name, institutional affiliation, course, instructor, and due date centered and doublespaced.

2. InText Citations

2.1 AuthorDate Format

Include the authors last name and the year of publication. Use a comma between them.

Paraphrase: (Smith, 2020) or Smith (2020) argues
Direct quote (with page): (Smith, 2020, p. 45) or Smith (2020) noted (p. 45).

2.2 Multiple Authors

Authors	Intext citation
One author	(Lee, 2019)
Two authors	(Garcia & Patel, 2018)
Three or more authors	(Nguyen et al., 2021)

2.3 No Author

Use the title (shortened) and year: (Study Finds, 2022).

2.4 Multiple Works in One Parenthesis

Separate citations with a semicolon and order alphabetically: (Brown, 2017; Miller, 2019).

3. Reference List

References appear on a new page titled References, doublespaced, with a hanging indent of 0.5 inches.

3.1 Book

Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book: Subtitle if any (Edition, if not first). Publisher.
Example: Miller, J. K. (2018). Research methods in psychology. Sage Publications.

3.2 Chapter in an Edited Book

Author, B. B. (Year). Title of chapter. In E. Editor & F. Editor (Eds.), Title of the book (pp. xxxx). Publisher.
Example: Davis, L. M. (2020). Motivation theories. In R. L. Green & T. H. Brown (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (pp. 4568). Routledge.

3.3 Journal Article

Author, C. C., & Author, D. D. (Year). Title of article. Title of Journal, Volume(Issue), pages. https://doi.org/xxxxxx
Example: Patel, S., & Lee, H. (2019). Cognitive bias in decision making. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(2), 250267. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000321

3.4 Online Article with No DOI

Author, E. E. (Year, Month Day). Title of article. Website Name. URL
Example: Zhou, Y. (2021, March 15). How social media shapes public opinion. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/03/social-media-opinion/

3.5 Conference Proceedings

Author, F. F. (Year). Title of paper. In G. G. Chairperson (Ed.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on XYZ (pp. xxxx). Publisher. https://doi.org/xxxxxx
Example: Kim, S. (2022). Machinelearning approaches to sentiment analysis. In H. Liu (Ed.), Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 112119). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1234567.1234599

3.6 Government Report

Name of Agency. (Year). Title of report: Subtitle (Report No. xxx). Publisher. URL (if online)
Example: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (2020). National health statistics report (Report No. DHHS2020001). https://www.hhs.gov/national-health-report.pdf

4. Formatting Specific Elements

4.1 DOIs and URLs

Present DOIs as a clickable link beginning with https://doi.org/.
Do not place a period after a DOI or URL to avoid breaking the link.
If no DOI is available, include the direct URL of the source.

4.2 Capitalization

Book and article titles: sentence case (only first word, proper nouns, and after a colon are capitalized).
Journal titles: title case (capitalize major words).

4.3 Italics

Italicize book titles, report titles, journal titles, volume numbers, and standalone website names.
Do not italicize article titles or page numbers.

5. Common Pitfalls

Missing hanging indent every reference line after the first must be indented 0.5 inches.
Incorrect author order list authors exactly as they appear on the source.
Using Retrieved from before a DOI DOI URLs stand alone without Retrieved from.
Overcapitalizing titles remember sentence case for article and book chapters.
Incorrect pagerange format use an endash () without spaces: 123130.

6. Sample Paper Outline (APA Style)

Title page
Abstract (150250 words, no indentation)
Keywords (after abstract, indented, italicized Keywords:)
Introduction
Method
1. Participants
2. Materials
3. Procedure
Results
Discussion
References
Appendices (if needed)

7. Helpful Resources

Following these guidelines will ensure that your work complies with the latest APA standards, improves readability, and gives proper credit to original authors.

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Reference Files For APA Citation Guide

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