APA: APA Style

American Psychological Association (APA) style is used in Psychology and other Social Sciences.

 The purpose of documentation is to:

• Identify (cite) other people’s ideas and information.
• Indicate the sources of these citations in a References list at the end of your paper.

This guide is based on the APA Manual (7th ed.) published in 2020.

The style guide from the American Political Science Association is very similar to APA.  If you are required to use APSA, refer to the following links:

APSA Style Manual for Political Science (rev. 2006)  This guide in PDF format is produced by the APSA Committee on Publications.

APSA Documentation from the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center.  Contains bullet points for specific elements.

Cite Source APSA Style from Trinity College, Hartford CT.  Convenient listing for all media types.

Where you see (p. #) with information in this guide, please refer to the designated page in the Publication Manual (7th ed.).

The library owns two copies of the 7th ed.:

REF BF76.7 .P83 2020  located downstairs in the Reference Collection and not available for checkout

BF76.7 .P83 2020  located upstairs and available for checkout

If you are new to using APA style, you may want to check out the tutorial for new users, located on the APA website.

Some of the changes include:

• Best Practices: The Publication Manual (7th ed.) has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect best practices in scholarly writing and publishing.
• A new chapter on journal article reporting standards that includes updates to reporting standards for quantitative research and the first-ever qualitative and mixed methods reporting standards in APA Style.
• Bias-free language guidelines.
• New-User Content: A dedicated chapter for new users of APA Style covering paper elements and format, including sample papers for both professional authors and student writers.
• Resources for students on writing and formatting annotated bibliographies, response papers, and other paper types as well as guidelines on citing course materials.

To learn more about the changes made in the new edition, check out the "What's New" section on the official APA Website.

You may also want to check out the APA blog to learn more about the corrections made to the new manual.

The APA Manual (7th ed.) is available at the library.