APA Format Quick Guide

Note to students using Grammarly: See this resource on Grammarly's Place in the Writing Process

APA-7 delineates two versions: the student version and the professional version. Formatting elements except the title page, running head, and abstract are the same across both versions. All undergraduate students at Liberty University must use the student version and all graduate and doctoral students must use the professional version.

Have a formatting question?

Helpful Resources

• Comprehensive APA-7 Reference List (PDF)
• APA-7 References to Legal Materials – Bluebook (PDF)
• Broad Overview of the Changes Between APA-6 and APA-7 (PDF)
• Comparison Chart of APA-6 and APA-7 (PDF)
• References Comparisons Between APA-6 and APA-7 (PDF)
• Sample Annotated Bibliography for Undergraduate Students (PDF)
• Sample Annotated Bibliography for Graduate/Doctoral Students
• Choosing Appropriate Resources for Academic Papers (PDF)

Video Tutorial links

• Plagiarism series – Video #1 of 4: Introduction: How often can students quote other sources? – Liberty University
• Plagiarism series – Video #2 of 4: How and when to cite your sources. – Liberty University
• Plagiarism series – Video #3 of 4: The three kinds of plagiarism. – Liberty University
• Plagiarism series – Video #4 of 4: Proactive and foolproof steps to avoid plagiarism. – Liberty University

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  Style

• Use active voice, rather than passive voice (PDF).
• Be specific and concise.
• Avoid poetic or figurative language; scientific writing is the most appropriate for APA.
• Use past or present perfect tense (e.g., researchers have shown) for a literature review and description, and past tense when referring to results and experiments previously conducted.
• Title case = all significant words, usually those with 4+ letters, must be capitalized. Title case is used for titles of works mentioned in the body of your paper, and for the names of journals in your reference list.  All five heading levels also use title case.
• Sentence case = only the first letter of the first word, proper nouns, and the word following a colon, if any, should begin with capital letters. Sentence case is used for all resource titles in the reference list (i.e., book or article titles, webpages, etc.).
• Use quotation marks around the titles of shorter works (i.e., articles or poems) and italics for the names of larger words (i.e., books or plays) mentioned in the body of your paper.
• APA-7 allows a wide array of fonts and sizes but Liberty University prefers all course assignments to be completed in 12-point Times New Romans or 11-point Calibri font.

Title Page

See the respective sample paper and template for your level of study (i.e., undergraduate or graduate/professional).

Abstract

See the respective sample paper and template for your level of study (i.e., undergraduate or graduate/professional).

Main Body

• Before beginning to write the body of your paper, center the paper’s title on the first line in title case in bold font, exactly as it appears on the title page. The title is now considered a Level 1 heading.
• Your introductory paragraph/section, if you have one, will begin on the next line. Note that APA-7 expressly forbids using the term introduction as a heading; just type that paragraph under the paper’s title without any heading. Professors always trump APA, so if your professor requires a heading labeled Introduction, then include it. If your introduction section includes subheadings, those would be formatted as Level 2 headings.
• APA-7 recommends only one space after closing punctuation in the body of the paper (whereas APA-6 recommended two).

Headings

• APA papers use headings to separate paper sections and establish a hierarchy of information.  Short papers (usually five pages or less in the body of the paper) may not have any headings unless required, but longer papers benefit from the organizational aspects of headings.
• Always begin with Level 1 headings and apply the appropriate heading and subheading levels from there.  Do not simply progress from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3.
• For each heading, include at least two subsection headings or none at all. This follows the same principle as an outline: Section one would be divided into sections A and B or more; A cannot stand alone.
• As such, heading levels align with outline levels: Capital Roman letters in an outline become Level 1 headings, Capital Arabic letters become Level 2 headings, etc.
• Please note that some of the sample papers published by APA to demonstrate proper APA-7 format (including the “professional” version on pp. 50-60 of the APA-7 manual) depict the “Conclusion” section with a Level-2 heading. This is limited to empirical papers that are being submitted for publication in scholarly journals, as those conclusions pertain to the “Discussion” sections in such papers and are not conclusions of the overall papers themselves.  Conclusions in academic papers at Liberty University will be Level 1 headings (including dissertations and theses, which are divided by chapters, unlike journal article manuscripts).
• A paper may only have Level 1 headings if it is not divided into smaller subsections — or the content under some Level 1 headings may include two or more Level 2 headings (and some content under Level 2 headings may include two or more Level 3 headings).
• See the sample APA papers for visuals of these heading levels:
  • Level 1: centered, boldface, in title case, with the content beginning on the line below
  • Level 2: left-aligned, boldface, in title case, with the content beginning on the line below
  • Level 3: left-aligned, boldface, italicized, in title case, with the content beginning on the line below
  • Level 4: indented, boldface, in title case with a period, then one space, and begin your content on the same line
  • Level 5: indented, boldface, italicized, in title case with a period, then one space, and begin your content on the same line

In-Text Citations

• An in-text citation is used whenever another author’s work is directly quoted or paraphrased.
• Citations for paraphrases use an author/date format: (Author, Publication Year), e.g. (Smith, 2007).
• The citation for a direct quote should also include the page number: (Author, Year, p. #). If no page number is available (as in the case of an online webpage), list the paragraph: (Author, Year, para. 11). APA-7 expands this to including descriptive location details to get your reader to that content in longer non-paginated electronic resources such as e-books.  In such cases, provide a heading or section name.  If the heading or section name is brief (generally four words or less) include the full name, without quotation marks (i.e., Owen, 2020,  Attachment Disorders section, para. 8).  If the heading or section name is too long (generally, more than four words), use an abbreviation of the heading or section, encapsulated in quotation marks.  For example, for a section named “Peace and Power in Modern Day Relationships,” the citation would be (Owen, 2020, “Peace and Power” section, para. 3).
• You can move information from the in-text citations to other parts of the sentence that the quote is part of as long as all required elements are present: e.g. Smith (2007) says, “arrows are sharp” (p. 8).  However, the date follows the author’s/authors’ name(s), unless APA’s exception applies for subsequent citations of the same resource in a paragraph in which the first such citation was narrative in-text (not parenthetical; discussed further in Liberty University OWC’s sample APA papers).
• The page number follows a direct quote, even if these elements are split within your sentence.  For example, Smith and Harlow (2011) elaborated on this by suggesting that “paper planes can float” (p. 8).  Owen (2017) posited that “foxes can fly” (p. 17) in her dream analysis.
• Any quotation longer than 39 words should be made into a freestanding “block” of text, with no quotation marks (see Liberty University OWC’s sample APA papers due to formatting limitations of this webpage).
• The entire left margin of block quotes should be indented one-half inch as a whole “block” (with no extra indent on the first line).
• The parenthetical citation with the page number on block quotes follows the quote and period, with no additional punctuation after it (unlike shorter quotes, where the parenthetical citation falls within the sentence itself with the period following it).

Discussion Board Posts

Discussion board posts at Liberty University are designed to mimic active classroom discussion among students (and sometimes the professor).  As such, though the content within them should be semi-formal and provide credit to sources, when a student refers to content from another student’s discussion board comments, only a mild referral to the other student’s name and which post that content originated from is necessary.  For example, as Mark stated in his initial thread, xyz.  Or as Charlotte stated in her response to Marienne, xyz. (No underlining would be used in the actual sentence used, of course).  This is the only exception permitted to “personal communications” and applies only within course discussion board replies in that class.

Bible

• The rules for Bible citations have changed completely; you must now cite the Bible version in the body of the paper and include it in your reference list. Please see the appropriate sample APA-7 paper for your level of study for a detailed discussion of this.
• Note that APA-7 specifies to cite Bibles in “book formats” (p. 302) that are “treated as having no author.” Below are some examples of the hard copy references versus online references of some common versions. The citations are the same for both, as they contain the version name and the year(s) of publication.  If you are using a different version, you will format it by following the examples given below (be sure to include a hanging indent, which this webpage cannot feature).
• Scripture should be cited from one of the mainstream Bible versions (see list of some below).  Study Bibles are generally NOT considered scholarly, as the notes within can be quite biased depending on the author of those notes, and thus Study Bibles should only be used sparingly by Divinity students as to exegetical projects.
• When including a verse, place it in the locator position after the year (in place of the page number).  For example, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (New American Standard Bible, 1971/1995, John 3:16).  You can also introduce it in the text of the sentence itself: John 3:16 proclaims that “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (New American Standard Bible, 1971/1995).

Liberty University Class Lectures

Since the purpose and function of APA references is to ensure the reader has sufficient information to be able to locate the original source if necessary, include course details and credit Liberty University when referencing class lectures and PowerPoint presentations since the URL does not provide sufficient locator details itself. Italicize the name of the lecture itself. If the course has multiple lectures per week, you can include the week and lecture numbers; otherwise omit those elements. If you have a direct URL, use that (see the Peters reference below); otherwise use the URL to Liberty University’s Canvas homepage (the reference on the left below).  If the date is provided (see the Peters reference below), use that; otherwise use the year and semester that you took the course in (the reference on the left below):

References

• • • Center the word “References” (in bold font but without quotation marks) on the top line of a new page following your conclusion.  This term is also now regarded as a Level 1 heading.  If you have only one resource to cite in the entire paper, APA authorizes the use of singular “Reference.”
    • Use hanging indents (the first line of each entry should be left-justified, with lines two+ indented ½” from the left margin).
    • Alphabetize all entries by the first word in each (usually the first author’s last name for each).
    • Note that you must include a comma after the author’s name that precedes the ampersand in the reference list, even when there are only two authors.  This does not apply to citations in the body of the paper.
    • There should only be one space after periods in the reference list entries, just as in the body of the paper.
    • If a work has more than 20 authors, list the first 19 followed by an ellipsis (…).  Include the last author’s name immediately after the ellipsis as the final author mentioned.  Do not include an ampersand (&) in references with 20 or more authors.
    • Note that APA-7 allows writers to superscript the suffixes of ordinal numbers, as long as the writer is consistent throughout (see section 6.35 of the APA-7 manual).  The examples included in the resources in this Quick Guide include superscripted suffixes for all book edition numbers, in accordance with APA-7’s option to do so.
    • Do include reference entries for classical works including the Bible.
    • Do not include reference entries for personal communication.
    • Do not include a period after a URL or DOI.
    • Note that the issue number of a journal article should be connected/attached to the volume number — e.g., 12(8).  The volume number should be italicized, but the attached parentheses and issue number should not.
    • Check Google Scholar or Crossref for DOIs of all articles published since 2007, if one is not readily denoted on the article itself.
    • Format all DOI entries in URL format (https://doi.org/xx.xxxxxxx).
    • Omit the publisher city and state in most cases (exception: conferences and symposiums).
    • Only include the access date for online content that is likely to change (such as wikis).
    • Do not include static hyperlinks which require log-on credentials to access, unless required by your assignment.  This includes EZproxy links obtained from searches in the Liberty University Online Library.
    • See the links at the top of this page for expansive reference entry examples.

Annotated Bibliographies

Sample Annotation (PDF)

Note that in a stand-alone Annotated Bibliography assignment, students would include the appropriate title page relative to their grade level; graduate and doctoral students would also include a running head on all pages as required for their grade levels.

Material on this page adapted from the Seventh Edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.