APA style
It is commonly used for citing sources within the field of behavioral and social sciences, including sociology, education, nursing, criminal justice, anthropology, and psychology.
The guidelines were developed to aid reading comprehension in the social and behavioral sciences, for clarity of communication, and for "word choice that best reduces bias in language".
[1][2] APA style is widely used, either entirely or with modifications, by hundreds of other scientific journals, in many textbooks, and in academia (for papers written in classes).
[9][10] According to the American Psychological Association, APA format can make the point of an argument clear and simple to the reader.
[12][13] The guidelines for reducing bias in language have been updated over the years and presently provide practical guidance for writing about age, disability, gender, participation in research, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality (APA, 2020, Chapter 5).
Level 1 states how a research paper must be organized by including a title page, an abstract, an introduction, the methodology, the results, a discussion, and references.
Level 3 specifies the mechanics such as double-spacing, using title case for headings, using numerals for numbers 10 and above, hyphenating compound adjectives, using in-text citations for sources, left aligning all tables and figures, and using footnotes sparingly.
The Publication Manual Revision Task Force of the American Psychological Association established parameters for the revision based on published critique; user comments; commissioned reviews; and input from psychologists, nurses, librarians, business leaders, publishing professionals, and APA governance groups.
[21][22] To accomplish these revisions, the Task Force appointed working groups of four to nine members in seven areas: bias-free language, ethics, graphics, Journal Article Reporting Standards,[23] references, statistics, and writing style (APA, 2009, pp. xvii–xviii).
Example narrative citation: Schmidt and Oh (2016) described a fear among the public that the findings of science are not real.Example parenthetical citation: "In our post-factual era, many members of the public fear that the findings of science are not real" (Schmidt & Oh, 2016).In the APA reference list, the writer should provide the author, year, title, and source of the cited work in an alphabetical list of references.
The reference format varies depending on the document type (e.g., journal article, edited book chapter, blog post, webpage), but broadly speaking always follows the same pattern of author, date, title, source.
