Hi, I'm Lindsay Keevey and I'm a faculty librarian at LCC. This is an overview of some of the basic APA style guidelines for student papers in the 7th edition. Before starting your paper, please ask your instructor whether their preference is for you to follow student paper or professional paper guidelines with the APA 7th edition. The main difference between the two is the information included on the title page and the inclusion of an abstract page. Professional papers include a running head and an abstract, while student papers do not.
And student papers include course information and due date on the title page, while professional papers do not. We will look at student papers in this video. So what is APA? APA stands for American Psychological Association. It's often used in social and behavioral science classes, nursing, and business.
And it's a standardized manuscript publication format, meaning if you were to submit your paper for publication in a journal, it would already be in the proper format for submitting to that journal. And it also provides a foundation for effective scholarly communication. The basic formatting for an APA student paper is a title page, the text or body of your paper, and the references list at the end.
You should use the same font throughout your paper, but APA 7 says you can choose whether it's a serif or sans serif font. The main issue is accessibility, so it needs to be readable. They suggest something like 11 point Arial, which is a sans serif because it's the font is straight up and down and doesn't have any end cap pieces or like 12 point Times New Roman, which is a serif font because it has the little. extra curves at the ends of all of the letters.
There are page numbers on your entire paper, and the entire paper is double spaced and has one inch margins, which you're probably already used to in formal paper writing. The title page of your paper should have a page number, a bold paper title, the author's name, which is you, and the author's institutional affiliation and department, the course number and name, the instructor name, and the assignment due date. This is the main difference between a student paper and a professional paper in the APA 7th edition.
This is what the title page would look like and you can see there's a page number on the top right. The title of the paper is centered and bold. There's no running head, which is different because you might have been used to that in the 6th edition APA. In a student paper now, there is no running head used. And then you have the author's name, which is you, so that Hannah K. Greenbaum is the author, the department that she is affiliated with, and the institution, so Department of Psychology, Lower Columbia College, and then the course information, Psych 317 Clinical Psychology, so the course number and title, and then the instructor's name of the course and the date that the paper is going to be turned in.
To set up your title page for a student paper, double click at the top of the page and insert. page number on the top right. Click to the left of the page number and hit enter or return until it's centered in the header. Select it and make sure it's the right text font and size that you want.
Then click out of the header. Start in the center of the page and type in the paper title. Underneath that, unbold. Type in the author, that would be you. Type in the departmental and institutional affiliations, the course number and title, the instructor of the course, and the date that the paper is due.
Make sure that only the title is bold and that there's an extra space between the title and the rest of the information. When you're done, click next to the end of the text on the page and go Insert, Break, and insert a page break. This will jump you down to the second page so that you can start the body of your paper.
To create your student paper title page in Word, double click at the top of a blank page to open up the header. First insert the page number. Go Insert, Page Number, Top of Page, and choose the right side.
Make sure the page number is the right font and size that you want. Click out of the header, center the text, and type the title of your paper. Underneath that, type in the author of the paper, which is you.
Underneath that, type in the departmental and institutional affiliations. Then type in the course name and number, the instructor of the course, and the date that the paper is due. Put the text towards the center of the page and put an extra space between the title and the rest of the information.
Make sure the title is bold. And when you're done, put the cursor at the end of all of the text, go to the Insert tab, and insert a page break. This jumps you to the second page so you're ready to begin writing your paper.
The second page of your student paper... we'll start with the body of the paper. So you will start the body of your paper on a new page.
You will have the entire title centered, bold, and an inch down from the top of the page, and then you will begin writing. And you'll begin each paragraph with a half inch indentation, or just by using the tab key, which is what you should be used to already. The body of your paper can also include headings, which we'll look at, and tables or charts. This is an example of the beginning of a body of your paper. So page one would be the title page which we just looked at, and then page two would be the beginning of your paper.
You can see that the title of the paper is bolded and centered at the top. Page two, the page numbering is continuing, and then this person just began writing their introduction and whatnot. Each paragraph is indented and it looks like it should. This is further into the body of the paper. This person chose to break up their parts of their paper into sections.
This section is guided imagery and this is a heading level one in APA. So in APA there are many heading levels that you can have depending on how long your paper is or how many subsections you want within a larger section. This person chose to have this large section of guided imagery as their first level heading.
And then they have smaller headings within this section called Features of Guided Imagery, Guided Imagery and Group Psychotherapy. And those level two headings are left aligned and bold. There are more levels than this, and there are rules for how each of them should be styled.
So if you have any questions about that, you can contact a librarian or you can visit the APA Style blog or Purdue OWL to see what the additional heading levels are. So there are a few things to remember with in-text citations when you're citing sources in the body of your paper. The key things to remember are that you need to enclose all borrowed language in quotation marks.
This means that any direct quotes that you pull from an outside source need to be quoted directly. You should never mix the sentence structure or vocabulary words of the original source with your own. explanation because that could be crossing into a plagiarism issue.
Anything that you summarize or paraphrase needs to be fully in your own words. So don't look at the source while you're writing your paraphrase. Really try to have it come from you and your understanding and your language, the way that you would explain it. Include the author date and page number if it's available in the citation. And one thing about that is that in APA, the author and the date always stay together.
So whether you are introducing the citation in your signal phrase or you are citing it at the end of your sentence, the author and date will always be together. And we'll look at examples of that. Your in-text citation should match the first part of your references page citation for that item. So if in the text of your paper, you are citing an author and a date.
the reference at the end of your paper in your references list should start with that same author and then that date. If your in-text citation cites an institution as the author, such as American Psychological Association 2006, then your reference listing should start with American Psychological Association 2006. They need to correspond with that first part of the reference. the in-text citations so the reader can quickly find that reference in your references list. Here's an example of two different examples of direct quotations.
The first one says interpreting these results Robbins 2003 suggested that and then they have a direct quote. They listed the page number after the end of the quote and then they continued their own explanation and put a period. So the author in this case decided to introduce the author and the date in the signal phrase before giving the quote.
The other option, if you can see this, is at the bottom here where it says confusing this issues the overlapping nature of roles in palliative care, whereby quote and then they include a direct quote from the source. And at the very end, they included the author and the date and the page number at the end of the quotation mark. Zoom out a little bit so you can see that. The author, date, and the page number are all in the parentheses together at the end. These are just two different ways that you can do direct quotations.
For paraphrases, it's pretty similar. So the first example here is starting studying early and reading material prior to and after class were not related to exam scores. That is all the author's own words, or at least it should be.
And then they included all of their citation information at the end of that paraphrase. So the author's last name and the date. They didn't include a page number because it's possible this information came from multiple pages or it's a broad summary of.
the entire article or piece that the author wrote. So you don't need to put page numbers for paraphrases if that idea doesn't come from a specific page. The other option of course is to include it in the signal phrase which incorporates that into the discussion.
So you could say Gerung 2005 has noted that starting studying early blah blah blah. So two different ways to do paraphrasing citations as well. So the references or your list of citations of sources that you consulted for writing your paper start again on a new page.
You label them references and that is bold and centered at the top of the page. You use hanging indents for each reference, meaning that it's the reverse of a traditional paragraph structure. So the beginning line of the reference is all the way flush left and if the reference spans two or more lines the second line on will be indented a half an inch.
I'll show you how to set that up properly and an example of what that looks like in a minute. Your references list in this APA 7th edition may include hyperlinks, but we always say check with your instructor on that because some instructors may not prefer for you to include hyperlinks in your references list. That means when you type in a URL or a DOI address at the end of a source that you cited, and you hit return or enter, it highlights and turns blue the link so that you can click on it and go to the link.
APA says that that's okay to have, but again some instructors might not like that or might want it formatted a certain way, so just double check about what your instructor prefers. This is an example of a references page. You can see the page numbering has continued all the way until the end here on the references page. It's all the way at page 10 now.
And then references is bold and centered at the top. And then the references are in alphabetical order from A to Z. And the hanging indent is showing as well. So this is one citation. This is another citation.
Jacobson is the next citation. It's on one line. McGuigan is the next citation and it's on three lines. And so the hanging indent is set up all correct.
So we can see the differentiation between each source. And then this is also an example showing the hyperlinked URLs in the references page. But again, like that's okay to do technically in APA 7, but your instructor may not want you to have that included.
So just double check. Here's an example of a journal article from a database, a reference created for that. The formatting layout would be last name, first initials. There would be the date. or the year that the article was published.
There would be the title of the article with only the first letter capitalized, unless there's a colon or if the word is a proper noun. So this is something weird with APA where they don't have you capitalize titles of articles or pieces. So in this case, teacher's style of thinking, colon, and then the A after the colon is also capitalized, an exploratory study. The title of the journal is capitalized. it's in italics.
The volume number is italicized, the issue number is not, there's no space in between them, and then the page range where that article came from in that journal issue are also there. If there's a DOI available you can include that, but APA says that you should not include the database URL. So again, double check with your instructor.
They may want you to include a permalink to the article. from the database and they may want you to just follow APA strictly. DOI stands for digital object identifier.
DOIs are more stable than URLs because they're a string of numbers and letters that are associated with that article. So if the URL where an article lives changes over time, the DOI will still be associated with that article. So if your article that you found has a DOI with it, you should try to use that.
instead of the URL because it's more stable. If your online source provides it, use that. Do not include the URL from a database.
Again, that's a new rule in APA 7 where they say don't include that information because it's so unstable. It requires a login most of the time and it's hard for someone to access later. This is an example of an edited print book. This would be similar to a textbook you might have.
Maybe you have a medical textbook or a nursing book that... was compiled by a lot of different editors or by one editor and wasn't necessarily written by just one person. So you would put the last name and first initials of the editor, and then you would signify that it was the editor by putting ed in parentheses, and then you would continue the rest of the citation just like you would anything else.
You would put the date, you will put the title with only the first letter capitalized except for after the colon. and in this case because it's a book you will italicize it as well. You might remember that the journal title was italicized for the journal article but the article title was not because the article is small and the journal is big.
Same thing with books, the book is big so you italicize it. The last part is you put the publisher. You don't put the location of the publisher or anything else, you just put the title of the publisher for print books. And then here's an example of how to cite the DSM-5.
This is where a book might have an organization as its author. In this case for the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association is the author. So you would list that in the author place.
You would still put the date. You would put the title of the book in italics. In this case it's the fifth edition so you include that as well. And then in the APA manual, their example of this included a DOI address for this book. So that just means that this book lives on a web's a web address with a DOI somewhere.
If you know that your book has that or if it says this is how you cite this book in the first few pages of the inside of the book, then go with what they recommend. Here's an example of the references page again and we will look next at how to set that up, how to get it formatted correctly with hanging indents, and how to alphabetize the references as well. When you're ready to create your references page, make sure that at the end of the text of your paper you put your cursor. and then you insert a break and a page break. This makes sure that your references start on a new page.
Type in references centered and bold at the top of the page and create your reference list. You don't need to do any indenting initially. Just create your references and make sure that there is a paragraph separation in between the two.
You can test this by making no space in between one. citation and the other and then hitting enter. When you're ready you can select all of your references and then go to format, align and indent, indentation options and under special select hanging.
When you apply this the hanging indents will be correctly applied. In Google Docs there isn't a way to alphabetize your paragraphs. But there is an add-on called Sorted Paragraphs that you can include in your Google Drive under Add-ons and Get Add-ons. When you have this add-on, you can select all of your references, go to Add-ons, find your Sorted Paragraphs add-on, and sort A to Z. This will alphabetize your references so you don't have to do it.
When you're finished writing your paper and you're ready to set up your references page, put the cursor at the end of all of your text, insert a page break. That ensures that your references will always be on the last page. Put the title references in bold at the top of the page, and make sure every one of your references is separated with the enter or return key. You can do this by clicking next to one of your references, hitting the backspace key, so there's no space in between the two references that are separate, and then hitting enter to make sure that each reference is its own paragraph. When you're done with that, you can select all of your references and from the home tab go to the paragraph pane and then under indentation there's a special option.
Click the drop down and select hanging, then say okay. This sets up the hanging indentation for you so that you don't have to do it with tab or anything else like the ruler, which are more difficult. To alphabetize your references from A to Z, select them all again and find in the Home tab the A to Z Sort button.
When you click it, it'll ask you to sort by paragraphs, which is what you want. So you say OK, and it will sort all of your references for you in alphabetical order. For more APA resources, visit our website. Our LCC library website has a tutorials page that has handouts, a citation guide, videos on how to set up formatting in APA, and then our citation help page has some links to additional APA help websites like Purdue OWL, and the APA Style Blog, and the APA manual that is in the library. So, and the APA Style Blog is great as well.
They have a ton of resources for APA 7.