APA standards

PUBLICATION MANUAL

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
(American Psychological Association)
7th ed. – 2020
APA Style Director:
APA Style Content Development Managers: Chelsea L. Bromstad Lee, Hayley S. Kamin, and Timothy L. McAdoo
APA Style Editors: Anne T. Woodworth and Ayanna A. Adams

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). http://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

ISBN 978-1-4338-3215-4 (Hardcover)
Printed in the United States of America

 

1. WORKS CREDITED IN THE TEXT

1.1. Basic In-Text Citation Styles (p. 266)

AUTHOR TYPE PARENTHETICAL CITATION NARRATIVE CITATION
One author (Luna, 2020) Luna (2020)
Two authors (Salas & D’Agostino, 2020) Salas and D’Agostino (2020)
Three or more authors (Martin et al., 2020) Martin et al. (2020)
Group author with abbreviation    
First citation (National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH], 2020) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, 2020)
Subsequent citations (MIMH, 2020) MIMH (2020)
Group author without abbreviation (Standford University, 2020) Standford University (2020)

1.2. Avoiding Ambiguity in In-Text Citations (p. 267)

Kapoor, Bloom, Montez, et al. (2017)
Kapoor, Bloom, Zucker, et al. (2017)

Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Jones-Miller (2015)
Hasan, Liang, Kahn, and Weintraub (2015)

(Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012a)
Judge and Kammeyer-Mueller (2012b)

(J. M. Taylor & Neimeyer, 2015; T. Taylor, 2014)

1.3. Primary and Secondary Sources (p. 258)

(Rabbitt, 1982, as cited in Lyon et al., 2014)
Allport’s diary (as cited in Nicholson, 2003)

1.4. Citing Multiple Works (p. 263)

When citing multiple works parenthetically, place the citations in alphabetical order, separating them with semicolons.

(Adams et al., 2019; Shumway & Shulman, 2015; Westinghouse, 2017)
Zhou (2000, 2016, in press)
(Carraway et al., 2013, 2014, 2019)
(Sampson & Hugues, 2020; see also Augustine, 2017; Melara et al., 2018; Pérez, 2014)

1.5. Citing Specifics Parts of a Source (p. 264)

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019, p. 10)
(Armstrong, 2015, pp. 3-17)
(Kovacic & Horvat, 2019, Table 1)

1.6. Paraphrases (p. 269)

Avid readers of science fiction and fantasy books are more likely than readers of other genres to believe in futuristic scenarios, for example, that it will someday be possible to travel to other galaxies or power a car on solar energy (Black et al., 2018).

Webster-Stratton (2016) described a case example of a 4-year-old girl who showed an insecure attachment to her mother; in working with the family dyad, the therapist focused on increasing the mother’s empathy for her child (pp. 152-153).

1.7. Short Quotations (pp. 271-272, 274-275, and 278)

If a quotation consists of fewer than 40 words, treat it as a short quotation: incorporate it into the text and enclose it within double quotation marks.

Effective teams can be difficult to describe because “high performance along one domain does not translate to high performance along other” (Ervin et al., 2018, p. 470).

Biebel et al. (2018) noted that “incorporating the voice of students with psychiatric disabilities into supported education services can increase access, involvement, and retention” (p. 299).

To direct quote from an audiovisual work (e.g. audio-book, YouTube video, TED Talk, TV show), provide a time stamp for the beginning of the quotation in place of a page number.

People make “sweeping inferences and judgements from body language” (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12).

Some changes to direct quotations require explanation:

De Backer and Fisher (2012) noted that “those [adults] who read gossip magazines, watch gossip-related television shows, or read gossip articles from internet sites … may feel guilty about wasting their time on a leisure pursuit” (p. 421). The emphasized that “it is important to remember that gossip helped our ancestors survive [emphasis added], and thus by accessing gossip, one is faced with an opportunity to vicariously learn solution [sic] to adaptive problems” (De Backer & Fisher, 2012, p. 421).

Quotations from participants whom you interviewed as part of your research are treated differently than quotations from published works. Because quotations from research participants are part of your original research, do not included them in the reference list or treat them as personal communications; state in the text that the quotations are from participants.

Participant “Julia,” a 32-year-old woman from California, described her experiences as a new mother as “simultaneously the best and the hardest time of my live.” Several other participants agreed, describing the beginning of parenthood as “joyful,” “lonely,” and “intense.” Julia and the other participants completed interviews in their homes.

1.8. Block Quotations (pp. 272-273)

If a quotation contains 40 words or more, treat it as a block quotation. Do not use quotations marks to enclose a block quotation.

Flores et al. (2018) described how they addressed potential researcher bias when working with an intersectional community of transgender people of color:

Everyone on the research team belonged to a stigmatized group but also held privileged identities. Throughout the research process, we attended to the ways in which our privileged and oppressed identities may have influenced the research process, findings, and presentation of results. (p. 311)

Regarding implications for chronic biases in expectation formation,

in order to accurately estimate whether people are likely to form positive or negative expectations on any given occasion, it is necessary to go beyond simply considering chronic individual differences and identify the factors that make people more likely to form expectations in line with one bias or the other.

The present research sheds light on this issue by identifying a crucial distinction in the operation of these two trait biases in expectation formation. Specifically, people’s valence weighting biases and self-beliefs about the future appear to shape expectations via qualitatively distinct processes. (Niese et al., 2019, p. 210)

1.9. Personal Communications (pp. 260-261)

Use a personal communication citation only when a recoverable source is not available.

Personal communications include emails, text messages, online chats or direct messages, personal interviews, telephone conversations, live speeches, unrecorded classroom lectures, memos, letters, messages from nonarchived discussion groups or online bulletin boards, and so on.

Because readers cannot retrieve the information in personal communications, personal communications are not included in the reference list; they are cited in the text only.

E.-M. Paradis (personal communication, August 8, 2019)
(T. Nguyenm personal communication, February 24, 2020)

Do not use a personal communication citation for quotes or information from participants whom you interviewed as part of your own original research.

We spoke with Anna Grant (personal communication, April 2019) about traditional understandings of the world by First Nations Peoples in Canada. She described …

1.10. Footnotes (pp. 40 and 55)

Footnotes callouts should be superscripted, following any punctuation mark except a dash.

… These findings produced a statistically significant interaction between course delivery method and evaluation year.1 Simple main effects test revealed statistically significant differences in the response rates for face-to-face courses and online courses for each of the 3 observation years.2

The first main effect involved evaluation year (see Footnote 1).

1 A Greenhouse-Geisser adjustment of the degrees of freedom was performed in anticipation of a sphericity assumption violation.

2 A test of the homogeneity of variance assumption revealed no statistically significant difference in response rate variance between the two delivery modes for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd years.

2. TABLES AND FIGURES (p. 197)

Tables and Figures follow the same structure.

Referring to Tables and Figures in the text:

As show in Table 1, the demographic characteristics…
Figure 1 shows the event-related potentials…
… of the results of the testing (see Table 3).
… of the comparisons (see Figures 4 and 7).

Sample Tables (pp. 215 and 217):

Sample Figures (pp. 235, 244, 247, and 249):

3. REFERENCE LIST

3.1. Textual Works

3.1.1. Periodicals (pp. 317 and 320)

3.1.2. Books (pp. 321-323)

3.1.3. Edited Book Chapters and entries in Reference Works (pp. 326-328)

3.1.4. Reports (pp. 329-330)

3.1.5. Conference Sessions and Presentations (pp. 332-333)

3.1.6. Thesis, Reviews and Unpublished Works (pp. 334-336)

3.2. Audiovisual Media

3.2.1. Audiovisual Works (pp. 342-344)

The person or group who uploaded the video is credited as the author for retrievability, even if they did not create the work.

3.2.2. Audio Works (pp. 344-346)

3.2.3. Visual Works (pp. 346-347)

3.3. Online Media

3.3.1. Social Media (pp. 348-350)

3.3.2. Webpages and Websites (p. 351)

3.4. Computer Software, Apparatus, and Mobile Apps (pp. 339-340)