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APA Style

Overview

What is the APA style?

The APA style is a set of guidelines for scientific communication established by the American Psychological Association . The guidelines range from describing the role of ethics in publishing to offering basic guidance on writing an article and citing sources. All guidelines appear in the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association .


What is new in APA style?

The new APA style introduces changes, which reflect current best practices in scholarly writing and publishing, offers guidelines on writing student and professional papers, and provides more than 100 reference examples in APA style. A detailed overview of the changes is available in the Guide to What’s New in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh edition .


Who should use APA?

Students, teachers, researchers, and professionals in the fields of psychology, education, social work, nursing, and other behavioral and social sciences as well as in business should use the APA style rules.


Why use APA?

Uniform style helps you identify easily key points and findings in a paper. It also assists you in presenting in an organized way the information you want to convey to your audience. Finally, it allows you to codify with accuracy and respect the elements required in order to give credit to those, who inspired your work.


How does APA work?

The APA style follows the author-date system to describe the information sources cited in a paper. This means that you should always provide the author and publication date of the source in the citations. Also, in this documentation style, you should include a short in-text citation in the body of the paper and a corresponding detailed reference at the end of the paper.