Psychology: APA style

What is APA Style?

You may be required to write all of your papers and presentations in this course in APA format. But, what is APA?!

APA is:

• A style manual published by the American Psychological Association
• Used in the health and social sciences
• Governs how we format our papers and ensures consistency
• Includes elements such as:
  • selection of headings, tone, and length;
  • punctuation and abbreviations;
  • presentation of numbers and statistics;
  • construction of tables and figures,
  • citation of references;
  • and many other elements that are a part of a manuscript.
• APA style refers to the physical appearance of our papers (type size, margins, running headers, tables, headings, punctuation, etc.); the way we cite our sources, both in text and in our References; and even the language we use when describing people.
• While there are similarities between MLA and APA citations, because APA is applied to different fields than MLA, the individual pieces that make up a citation are arranged differently.
• Remember than many of the Library's databases will provide an APA citation that you can copy and paste into your References page, however, you will need to correct any minor errors, and change the formatting to match that of your paper.

A Quick Look at The Two Parts of an APA Citation

Here's one sample “in text citation” and what its "references list citation" mate would look like. 

In-Text Citation:

In her 2017 article, Sproat claimed that she would “rather clean toilets than learn citation rules” (p.4); however, she eventually came to a better understanding of APA. 

Matching Reference List citation:

Notice the following common APA features in the reference list entry above:

1. Author surname/family name and initials (first/given names are never spelled out). Note: If there is no author listed, then use the title of the article as the first part of the citation.
2. Date is ALWAYS the second element and always in parentheses.
3. Article titles are not capitalized, except the first word in the title and subtitle and any proper nouns.
4. Titles of journals are always capitalized and italicized.
5. The journal volume number (17, in this example) is also always italicized.
6. The issue number (4, in this example) is NOT italicized and is always in parentheses.
7. The page number follows the volume and/or issue number—there is no “p.” or “pg.” preceding it  (although there IS a “p.” in the citation in text).
8. Reference list citations are alphabetized, with "hanging indent" formatting

APA Style Handouts

Here are some handouts (in both .docx and .pdf formats) featuring examples citations for sources you might find through TCC's Library and the Web.

References

In-Text Citations

Citing Social Media

Purdue OWL Guides: APA 7